When the Tide Rises Read online

  CONTENTS

  Cover

  Also by David Drake and Available from Titan Books

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Author’s Note

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-one

  Chapter Twenty-two

  Chapter Twenty-three

  Chapter Twenty-four

  Chapter Twenty-five

  Chapter Twenty-six

  Chapter Twenty-seven

  Chapter Twenty-eight

  Epilogue

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  ALSO BY DAVID DRAKE AND AVAILABLE FROM TITAN BOOKS

  THE REPUBLIC OF CINNABAR NAVY SERIES

  With the Lightnings

  Lt. Leary, Commanding

  The Far Side of the Stars

  The Way To Glory

  Some Golden Harbor

  In the Stormy Red Sky (April 2018)

  What Distant Deeps (July 2018)

  The Road of Danger (October 2018)

  The Sea Without a Shore (January 2019)

  Death’s Bright Day

  Redliners (April 2019)

  THE REPUBLIC OF CINNABAR NAVY

  DAVID DRAKE

  TITAN

  BOOKS

  When the Tide Rises

  Print edition ISBN: 9781785652271

  E-book edition ISBN: 9781785652288

  Published by Titan Books

  A division of Titan Publishing Group Ltd

  144 Southwark Street, London SE1 0UP

  First Titan edition: January 2018

  2 4 6 8 10 9 7 5 3 1

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental. The publisher does not have any control over and does not assume any responsibility for author or third-party websites or their content.

  Copyright © 2008, 2018 by David Drake. All rights reserved.

  No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means without the prior written permission of the publisher, nor be otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

  A CIP catalogue record for this title is available from the British Library.

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  To John Lambshead, my guide to many of the places I’ve used in this and other recent books; And the man who changed the way I look at nematodes.

  AUTHOR’S NOTE

  The genesis of my RCN novels was Patrick O’Brian’s wonderful Aubrey/Maturin series, set during and after the Napoleonic Wars. It therefore won’t surprise many of you to find a number of plot points common to O’Brian’s last novels and When the Tide Rises. This is a case of convergent evolution, however, rather than direct borrowing on my part: we’re both working from Lord Cochrane’s memoirs of service under the revolutionary governments of Chili (sic) and Brazil.

  Jack Aubrey and Daniel Leary are supporting independence movements as agents of their governments. In reality, the British government threatened Cochrane with prosecution if he accepted the Chilean offer, and the British warships which Cochrane encountered during his operations against the Spanish empire baulked him at every possible opportunity.

  Mr. O’Brian isn’t around to ask, but I suspect we diverge from Cochrane’s reality for the same reason. If you’re writing a series, you create an enormous problem for yourself if your hero is seen as a traitor by his government. Cochrane himself returned to favor, but it took more than thirty years for that to happen.

  Lord Cochrane was skilled, intelligent, and personally brave. Having said that, his memoirs often make uncomfortable reading. It’s not that he was too stupid to see the political ramifications of his actions; rather, he looked on such considerations as unworthy of a superior being like himself. The political disasters which follow military victories throughout Cochrane’s career, with the Royal Navy and then with foreign governments, seem to the reader as inevitable as night following day.

  Cochrane frequently says about the people with whom he dealt, “He swore to do something, but he didn’t carry through on his promises.” After a while, I became exasperated with this nonsense. Cochrane was an extremely intelligent and experienced man who must have expected the bad result. As with a woman who’s married three abusive drunks in a row, there’s more involved than bad luck or even bad judgment.

  But what that means is that Cochrane was unwilling to work within the system when his undoubted brilliance made it possible for him to have done so. It is equally true that the systems he was involved with were deeply flawed—the Royal Navy in the early nineteenth century, and the South American revolutionary governments.

  What comes through powerfully in every English memoir I’ve read involving Latin America at that time is that almost none of the players (Bolivar may have been an exception) had a concept of a nation that was greater than the individual’s own clan/family/tribe ruling as many of its neighbors as possible. Consistently when a region revolted from the colonial power (Spain or Portugal), the districts revolted from the capital and then the wealthy magnates revolted from the district government (which was generally run by one of the several powerful families in that district). The magnates than spent their time in burning out rival magnates.

  If you’ve been following Latin American politics for the past fifty years or so (I suspect the problems go much farther back, but I personally don’t), you might reasonably come to the conclusion that nothing much has changed. For even more vivid modern examples of clan-based politics, consider Iraq and Afghanistan.

  The business of When the Tide Rises is taken largely from real events in Chile, Peru, and Brazil. The major naval action, however, is based on the 1811 Battle of Lissa. (The 1866 Battle of Lissa is fascinating, but in fiction you couldn’t make one side as incompetent as the historical losing side was. As one example, the gun crews of the defeated flagship forgot to load shells and therefore fought the battle firing blank charges.)

  I write to entertain readers, not to advance a personal or political philosophy (I don’t have a political philosophy); nonetheless, my fiction is almost always based on historical models. When you read When the Tide Rises, you might occasionally think about today’s news and remember that it’ll be tomorrow’s history.

  Heaven knows, I thought about the news while I was writing.

  —Dave Drake

  david-drake.com

  When the sands are all dry, he is gay as a lark, And will talk in contemptuous tones of the Shark: But, when the tide rises and sharks are around, His voice has a timid and tremulous sound.

  —A
lice’s Recitation

  (from Alice in Wonderland)

  Lewis Carroll

  Chapter One

  XENOS ON CINNABAR

  Commander Daniel Leary sipped whiskey from a glass with the Quenzer monogram as he surveyed his fellow guests; he held his lips in a neutral smile. He didn’t know any of those present except for Miranda Dorst, his “plus one,” but Sarah Sterret, the brunette wearing a diamond tiara, looked vaguely familiar.

  Vaguely familiar. Mistress Sterret wasn’t bad-looking, but she hadn’t seen thirty in a while. Her husband, Nathan Sterret, a senior captain who was part of the complement of Navy House, needn’t fear that the dashing Commander Leary would stray into his pastures.

  Besides, Daniel was with Miranda now.

  “Thank you, my good man,” Miranda said as she took the faintly fizzy drink she’d ordered from an offered tray. She smiled, every inch the gracious lady.

  Daniel swelled with pride. She fitted perfectly into this gathering; fitted better than a country boy like him, truth to tell, for all that the Dorsts, mother and daughter, had made the simple black dress she was wearing. They and Miranda’s late brother Timothy had lived in straitened circumstances ever since the early death of Captain Dorst, but class will tell.

  The hostess gave a tiny nod; the footman in the doorway tapped the silver bell in his left hand.

  “Please join me in the dining room,” said Dame Cathleen Quenzer, a tall woman of sixty-odd who made her bulk look imposing rather than soft. “You’ll find cards at your places.”

  Her politeness went no deeper than the words. Daniel had heard warrant-officer trainers at the Academy shout “Hop it, you miserable worms!” and sound less certain that they’d be obeyed.

  “We’re all here, then?” said the extremely handsome young man. He seemed to be with Senator Forbes, the chair of the Finance Committee. She was a small woman but birdlike only if you were thinking of hawks. Daniel doubted the relationship was grandmother and grandson, though the age difference made that possible. “It doesn’t seem very many. Eight?”

  Andrew Cummins glanced back over his shoulder as he entered the dining room. “Cathleen follows the old maxim that guests at a dinner party should number more than the Graces and fewer than the Muses, dear boy,” he said.

  Smirking he added, “That’s three and nine, if you were wondering. I don’t suppose you have much experience of the Muses, though your grace is beyond question.”

  Cummins too was a senator, though not nearly as powerful as Forbes. His fame came from being the most successful criminal advocate in Xenos—and thereby on the hundred and more worlds owing allegiance to the Republic of Cinnabar.

  Cinnabar citizens didn’t like to think of themselves as ruling an empire, but Daniel had studied enough history at the Naval Academy to know that was the reality. The fact didn’t concern him, of course. He was an officer of the Republic of Cinnabar Navy, and he’d carry out any orders his superiors in the RCN gave him. If he’d been interested in philosophy, he’d be in another line of work.

  Besides, being ruled by the Cinnabar Senate was better by any standard than being being a citizen of the so-called Alliance of Free Stars and living under the thumb of Guarantor Porra. The Alliance wouldn’t stop expanding of its own will, but it could be stopped. The RCN had been doing a very good job of that, and the medals on both breasts of Daniel’s Dress Whites proved to anyone who saw him that he’d taken an active part of that process.

  “Commander?” said a footman obsequiously. “I’ll guide you to your seat, if you will.”

  “Yes, of course,” Daniel said. Another servant was murmuring to Miranda; even Cummins, obviously a regular at these dinners, was being escorted.

  Daniel found it interesting that the servants wore not the cream-and-russet livery of the late Senator Quenzer but the orange-and-azure of Dame Cathleen’s own family, the D’Almeidas. He wasn’t interested in Society in the sense that Dame Cathleen was, but he was the son of Corder Leary, once Speaker of the Senate and even now one of the most powerful members of that body. Families and family alliances had been matters of life and death when Speaker Leary crushed the Three Circles Conspiracy seventeen years ago.

  The rectangular table wouldn’t have seated more than eight diners comfortably, nor would a larger table have fit the room. There was an assembly hall on the second floor—Daniel had attended a rout at Quenzer House two years before when he was an up-and-coming lieutenant—but at the time he couldn’t have imagined he’d be invited to one of the intimate dinners for which Dame Cathleen was famous.

  Let alone that he’d be seated to the right of his hostess, with Senator Forbes to his own right. Captain Sterret was at the end of the row. Miranda was across the table from him, sitting beside Cummins.

  From the way the attorney leered as he spoke to Miranda in a low voice, he fancied himself a ladies’ man. He must be corseted to fit into his coat and dazzling vest, and that made his red face bulge the more. Miranda laughed lightly and avoided eye contact, sipping from the glass she’d brought to the table while looking toward Captain Sterret.

  Sarah Sterret—why did she look familiar?—was opposite Daniel. He couldn’t read her expression as she watched him, but it was something more than polite curiosity. Mind, he was used to drawing women’s attention when he glittered in full dress, but he wasn’t at all sure Sterret’s look was positive.

  The steward at the sideboard beside the doorway began ladling the soup course into bowls. Senator Forbes had brought servants for herself and her pretty boy, but the remaining guests would be served by the household staff.

  Hogg had accompanied Daniel and Miranda to the dinner, but he was in the kitchen now . . . or possibly in the butler’s pantry, looking over the bottled goods with an eye for kick rather than for delicate bouquet. Daniel wouldn’t trade Hogg for a hundred ordinary footmen, but bringing him into this dining room would demolish all his hopes of gaining allies in what he was being forced to view as his battle with Navy House.

  “You’re recently back on Cinnabar, are you not, Commander?” Dame Cathleen said. “From some sort of hush-hush derring-do, I’m sure?”

  Daniel set down his whiskey—well, the last sip of his whiskey—and said, “Oh, nothing whatever romantic, Dame Cathleen. It was an advisory mission to the back of beyond, deep into Ganpat’s Reach, if that means anything to you. No reason it should, of course.”

  “No doubt you gathered some more pretty medals, though, haven’t you, Commander?” said Sarah Sterret archly. She glanced around her fellow guests with an icy smile. “Commander Leary seems to have a new medal every time you see him.”

  She leaned forward slightly to look down the table at Miranda. “Medals and other sorts of trophies, that is.”

  Oh my God, I have met her! Daniel realized. Though he hadn’t paid much attention to her at the time, which was at least part of the problem. Was she married then?

  That’d been several years ago when he was just back from a triumph on Kostroma that’d made him a nine-days wonder. It’d been at a ball, not here at Quenzer House but in a similar venue. She was with a cute blonde named Bobbi, Bobbi . . . well, it didn’t matter. He and Bobbi hadn’t really been on a last-name basis.

  Daniel’d known at the time that Mistress Sterret wasn’t best pleased by the way he’d ignored her increasingly blatant suggestions, but good heavens! Had she really thought that he’d be interested in a woman her age?

  Apparently she had, and here she was across the small table from him. And—he glanced sidelong at Dame Cathleen, who wore an impish smile—his hostess had probably been aware of the fact when she made up the dinner invitations. People often became whimsical when they had considerable power and no proper outlet for it.

  Corder Leary had never been whimsical.

  “Why no, mistress, I don’t believe there’ll be any medals,” Daniel said easily. The best way he could see to handle the situation was to be polite and a trifle distant; the last thing he needed was t
o raise the emotional temperature. “Nor is there any call for them. It was just an ordinary advisory mission, the sort of duty that goes to officers who’re between ships.”

  He smiled wider and included the whole table in it.

  “As I still am, I’m afraid,” he went on. “Though I’m hopeful Navy House will find a way for me to serve the Republic again soon.”

  Daniel hadn’t exactly been a protégé of Admiral Anston, the former Chief of the Navy Board, but Anston had seemed to see in Daniel the sort of cleverness that’d brought him to wealth and the leadership of the RCN.

  But Anston had retired abruptly after a heart attack. The new Chief, Admiral Vocaine, viewed as an enemy anyone whom he saw as having been close to his predecessor.

  Daniel grinned despite himself. Unfortunately, he wasn’t powerful enough to really count as Vocaine’s enemy.

  The servants set bowls of oxtail soup before the guests with the precision of a drill team. Dame Cathleen was likely as stern as any Land Forces drillmaster. If she didn’t herself correct errors with a baton, that was simply because she had senior servants to whip the footmen for her.

  “Hmmph!” snorted Captain Sterret, staring fixedly at his soup as he thrust his spoon into it. “A lot of young officers think the Personnel Bureau should make assignments for their convenience, not the RCN’s. Why—”

  He raised his eyes and swept the table. His jaw twitched as his gaze passed over Daniel, but he didn’t linger to glare.

  “—you wouldn’t believe the demands some of them make. Demands!”

  “Ah, but Commander Leary isn’t simply another young officer, is he, Captain?” said Cummins. “Why—”

  He was speaking to the whole table, but he shifted his eyes from Sterret to Daniel, who’d been looking toward the ormolu-and-crystal light fixture on the opposite wall. It was a remarkably ornate thing which nonetheless seemed to work as well as a simpler unit at providing diffuse illumination.