The Sea Without a Shore - eARC Page 17

  “Nobody’s complaining, Hogg,” Daniel said. “And I’m certainly not.”

  The last door on the right-hand side was open, but the office was empty. Daniel turned, wondering which office was customs and whether it was even on this corridor. A man was hurrying toward from one of the rooms they had passed, making an effort to button his blue jacket.

  “You’re the guys with the arms shipment?” the fellow said. “I’m Kalet, the harbormaster. Go on into the office, will you? And tell me—”

  He followed Daniel and Hogg into the office and slipped between them to the workstation on the desk.

  “—who’s your sponsor? I didn’t get that from your transmission.”

  “Sponsor?” Daniel said. Polarizing blinds turned the room’s two windows a startling red, but the light passing through them was neutral. “I’m the Kiesche’s owner, if that’s what you mean.”

  “No, no,” Kalet said. He typed with his index fingers alone, scowling in determination. “I mean, which party are you delivering to?”

  “Oh,” said Daniel. He hadn’t sat on either of the rickety chairs facing the desk; he wasn’t sure they would hold him. “The Transformationists.”

  Kalet stopped typing and stared at Daniel. “Them?” he said. “Why, you got enough guns for a division aboard! What’re those dreamers going to do with a load like that?”

  Daniel shrugged. “That’s not my problem,” he said. “They were loaded Free On Board on Cinnabar, and I’m delivering them to the consignee here. My purser’s talking with the local agent now.”

  The Kiesche carried a thousand carbines and ten automatic impellers: enough small arms to equip an understrength regiment, perhaps, but not a division on any civilized planet. Daniel smiled at the thought.

  “Look, I’m not sure I can clear this,” Kalet said. He grubbed a bandanna from the side-pocket of his jacket and wiped the sudden sweat from his forehead. “There’s going to be trouble, I know it—”

  Daniel rested his knuckles on the desk and leaned onto them. “There won’t be trouble with me if you do your job,” he said, hearing his voice roughen.

  “I—” Kalet said.

  “Master!” Hogg said, moving slightly to put his back against the sidewall. A group of people crowdd into the doorway, blocking one another’s passage and snarling.

  First to enter was the woman wearing a gray business suit that wasn’t quite a uniform. The two men—who did wear uniforms—had shoved one another apart and she slipped through. The men followed instantly. More armed men crowded the hall, but they halted at the doorway.

  “Hochner!” the woman said. She was tall and wore her hair as a tight sheath for her skull. She’d been a brunette but had let her hair go mostly gray instead of dyeing it. “You know the rules: no thugs in the Manor. Do you want to be the moron who made the Garrison outlaws to everybody on the planet? Do you want to explain to Mursiello what you’ve done?”

  The bulky man with red hair and a shaggy beard wore what seemed to be Garrison utilities with a great deal of gold braid added. Though he clenched a fist at his side, he turned to the doorway and said, “Bili! Take the company outside. I don’t need you here.”

  “I’m Eugenia Tibbs, Administrator of the Self Defense Regiment,” the woman said briskly to Daniel. “I’m here to purchase your cargo.”

  “The Corcyran Navy will better any other offer you get here,” said the other man: tall and very dapper, with thin, curling moustaches and a pointed goatee. “I’m Captain Samona, and I can transfer the credits to you before we leave this room.”

  “I have precedence, Samona!” Tibbs said. Turning quickly back to Daniel she said in an attempt to be jolly, “I assure you that the Regiment is by far the best-funded and most trustworthy organization on Corcyra.”

  “Now look here—” Samona said.

  “Now both of you pissants shut up!” Hochner said. His shoulder boards bore the two solid squares of a captain in the Alliance Army; the Garrison had been enrolled in Alliance service and probably used the same insignia.

  “In fact…,” Hochner said, backing to put himself between Daniel and the faction leaders whom he was facing. “Why don’t you both get your asses out of here? The Garrison’s the only real power here on Corcyra, however much you lots swank around with your Pantellarian accents!”

  “Excuse me, sir,” Daniel said. He tapped Hochner’s right shoulder. “You’re crowding me.”

  Hochner slapped at Daniel’s hand without turning around. “Then move back!” he said while both exile leaders gabbled at him in rising voices.

  The harbormaster, Kalet, had moved into the corner behind his desk. He watched the verbal brawl with a miserable expression.

  Daniel grabbed Hochner’s right wrist with his left hand and bent it up behind his back. Hochner roared and spun to his right. Daniel punched the bigger man in the pit of the stomach.

  Hochner gasped. Because he was already off-balance, he fell forward onto his knees. With difficulty he managed to stretch out his right hand so that he didn’t sprawl on his face.

  “Want me to put the boot in, master?” Hogg said hopefully.

  “I don’t think that will be necessary, Hogg,” said Daniel. He stepped forward and put his back to the harbormaster’s desk so that all three faction representatives were in his range of vision. Kalet was certainly not a threat.

  “I appreciate that you all find this matter to be important,” Daniel said calmly, “but you’re dealing with the wrong party. My cargo belongs the consignee, the Transformationist Community. You need to deal with them.”

  “What’s he doing?” said Mistress Tibbs, glancing to Daniel’s side. His eyes followed hers.

  Hogg snicked open the blade of his knife and bent over Hochner. Daniel frowned though he didn’t object aloud. He didn’t remember Hogg exceeding what he thought his master would consider reasonable…or at least would consider on the edge of reasonable.

  Hogg used his right little finger to jerk slack in Hochner’s gunbelt, then sliced through the leather. He pulled up the portion containing the holstered pistol, then straightened, closed the knife, and dropped it into a baggy pocket.

  “I’m just looking ahead, lady,” Hogg said. “Like a peasant learns to do, you know? And—”

  His tone hadn’t been friendly before. Now it rasped like a cross-cut saw.

  “—I’m a freeborn citizen of Cinnabar, not a thug, and I’m good enough for this Manor or any bloody place on Corcyra. Got it?”

  “Forgive my question, citizen,” Tibbs said. There was laughter in her eyes if not quite in her words. “I assure you, I didn’t believe that your master needed thugs to protect him from such as Captain Hochner.”

  “We’ll go now, I think,” Daniel said. He turned his head toward the harbormaster. “Master Kalet, I will take it that I’ve fulfilled my obligations to the port authorities. If there’s some additional form to sign or the like, please bring it to the Kiesche and I’ll see that it’s taken care of.”

  He nodded to Tibbs, then Samona. “Mistress,” he said. “Captain. I don’t believe we have any business to transact, but you can find me on my ship if there is.”

  Hogg dropped the holster on the floor and thrust the pistol under his belt. It was a standard Alliance service weapon, much like the RCN equivalent which Daniel wore when formality required him to. Daniel was quite a good shot with longarms, but he didn’t like handguns.

  “I’ll call on you shortly, Captain,” Samona said brightly as Daniel walked past.

  “And I,” said Administrator Tibbs.

  Daniel and Hogg walked through the lobby at the same businesslike pace as when they had entered. The desk clerk called, “Decided on a room?”

  “I’m going to look up an old girlfriend first,” Daniel said. “I may be back.”

  He’d thought of taking a room to camouflage his intentions—he certainly wasn’t going to sleep away from his command after that meeting—but he’d decided he wanted to get back to the ship a
s quickly as possible. Under other circumstances, the Manor might have been a pleasant change from the cramped quarters of a tramp freighter, but the center of Brotherhood was a bomb ready for a spark. The civilians had no choice but to stay; but Daniel did, and he was exercising it.

  Thirty or forty Garrison soldiers stood or sat on the veranda; they looked ill at ease but not hostile, rather like a pack of dogs milling in an unfamiliar environment. Daniel nodded bare acknowledgment to the squat fellow with sergeant-major bars, but he stepped past briskly to avoid a chance of conversation. The civilians had moved on.

  Hogg had kept his face front to avoid eye contact, which in his case might have meant a challenge. Hogg could look like a simple rustic, but he didn’t have Daniel’s skill at projecting friendly confidence when he was expecting everything to blow up in an instant.

  “Think we’re going to have to shoot our way out of this?” Hogg said as they crossed the plaza at a quicker pace than they’d kept when they approached.

  “I don’t think so, no,” Daniel said. “But I’ll admit that I’ve been wishing I’d spent more time on pistol practice when I had the leisure.”

  “I’ll give you this,” Hogg said, patting the sub-machine gun’s barrel with his left hand—the hand that wasn’t on the grip. “Hochner’s piece ought to do all right for me.”

  They started down the slope toward the harbor. The Kiesche’s plasma cannon seemed to be locked—it probably wasn’t—straight ahead, because anything else would arouse comment.

  In the crosstrees of the raised mast was a crewman with a long canvas-wrapped bundle, almost certainly a stocked impeller. Without using his goggles’ magnification, Daniel couldn’t identify the spacer, but from his size he was probably Barnes—which meant Sun was at the controls of the plasma cannon.

  “I hope we’re being unreasonably concerned,” Daniel said. “If we’re not, though, I couldn’t ask for better people around us than we’ve got.”

  Hogg grunted. After a moment he said, “I hope the mistress is aboard when we get there. I figure we’re going to need some magic on this one, and I don’t know a better magician than her!”

  CHAPTER 13

  Brotherhood on Corcyra

  “There’ll be guards at the front entrance,” Tovera said, eyeing the side of the building as they walked along Ridge Road toward the plaza. “It wouldn’t be any trick to get in through one of those windows, and there’s a door in the alley that looks like it’s into the basement. There may not have been anybody down there in fifty years.”

  “There’s no reason they shouldn’t allow access by an off-planet scholar, Tovera,” Adele said. “I want real access to the collections, not a peek and escaping in a hail of gunfire. If simply asking doesn’t get us in, I’ll consider other methods.”

  The five ground floor windows along this side were grated. Though the wrought iron bars looked sturdy, over the centuries the bolts fastening them to the wall had wept long trails of rust down the pale limestone. A prybar would pop the gratings off, likely enough, and the two upper ranges of windows didn’t have even that much protection.

  A squad of Garrison soldiers had built a shelter by stretching a tarpaulin between the palace front and two of the trees protected by ancient stone curbs along this edge of the plaza. The troops had moved chairs and couches into the shade and were cooking on a grill which generated power from a fuel cell. It was enameled field-gray and was probably military issue. None of the soldiers was female, but half a dozen civilian women ate and drank with the guards.

  Another soldier sat in the recessed doorway. He was either asleep or so close to it that Adele could have stepped around his legs and entered unchallenged if she had wished to.

  “Excuse me, my good man,” she said primly. The doorway was arched. The wooden panel which was still closed was carved with half a complex coat of arms. “I’m here to view the Gulkander Library. Will you direct me, please?”

  “Whazzat?” said the soldier, jerking alert. He straightened, banging his head against the stone. The carbine slipped off his lap and the steel buttplate clattered on the pavement. He grabbed for his weapon.

  Adele flinched internally, though if the carbine had gone off, the slug would have taken the soldier in the belly without endangering her or Tovera. The indicator on the weapon’s receiver showed that there was a loaded magazine in place, which wasn’t always a certainty with troops of this quality.

  “How do I go about viewing the Gulkander Library, please?” Adele repeated calmly. So far as she could tell, the other guards were ignoring what was going on in the doorway. Tovera kept an eye on them, however, while smiling in bland innocence.

  “Ma’am?” the soldier repeated, blinking at her. “Ma’am, you better ask the El-Tee. Lieutenant Pastis, I mean.”

  He put a palm on the threshold as though he were about to stand up. He held that pose with his mouth open, however, until Adele and Tovera had gone through the door.

  A broad corridor ran down the center of the interior. The coffered ceilings on the ground floor were fifteen feet high. They reminded Adele of those of Chatsworth Minor when she was a child.

  As an adult and titular owner of the townhouse now, she spent no more time on the ground floor than it took her to climb the stairs to her own apartments on the third and fourth floors, but when she was a child she had wandered throughout the house. Her parents had used the rooms on the ground floor to entertain their more common—vulgar—political guests: the ward heelers and, Adele was now sure, the men whose gangs protected Popular Party rallies from hecklers and who broke up opposition rallies.

  It was garishly romantic when Adele was a child. I really was a child, she realized. Or I could have been.

  Adele did not regret her childhood, any more than she regretted the weather: it simply was. She had been quiet and bookish from the first. Her father was always on the public stage, whether or not there was another human being present, and her mother was too immersed in ideas to notice facts. Neither had been concerned that their older daughter lived in a world of information and arrangements of information instead of playing with other children.

  And why should they have cared? Adele had access to everything she wanted. She had used that access to hone her skills to an exceptional, perhaps a unique, degree. She was a productive member of society, to the degree that mattered. It hadn’t mattered to Adele herself until she met Daniel Leary and became a member of his society, his family: the RCN.

  The space to the left of the entrance was open; it had probably been a waiting room for those attending the Governor. Now it was railed off into an orderly room containing two clerks at consoles and a desk behind which a lieutenant sat comparing the flimsy in his right hand with the flimsy in his left. From his scowl, the comparison wasn’t going well.

  “Excuse me,” Adele said, sharply enough to get somebody’s attention. “I’m here to view the Gulkander Library. I’m Lady Mundy, on Corcyra as a Cinnabar envoy—”

  That wasn’t quite a lie, but it was close enough to make Adele uncomfortable.

  “—but I wish to see the library as a private citizen.”

  “Bloody hell,” the lieutenant muttered. The hand-lettered card on his desk read Adjutant. “Look, if you need your hand held, you’re out of luck. The books were moved to storage in the basement, and I don’t have any bloody idea of what you’ll find.”

  “I’ll be all right, I think,” Adele said, no more dryly than she said most things. She looked down the corridor. “How do I get to the storage area?”

  The room which balanced the orderly room on the right side of the front had brass-mounted double doors. The valves were closed, showing holes where the original decoration—probably a brass coat of arms—had been removed. In its place now was the legend Commander in Chief. The letters had been cut freehand with a great deal of skill from white-enameled sheet metal.

  Ranged on both sides of the hallway were plush chairs which matched the couches outside with the guards. They
would serve for people waiting, but they appeared simply to have been moved out of the way when the rooms were converted to Garrison use.

  Farther back were three doors on either side, mostly open. Between the first and second on the right side was a staircase leading upward.

  “You see the stairs?” the lieutenant said, pointing. “Well, the door beside it, that’s the way down. And good luck to you.”

  “Thank you,” Adele said, more polite than the fellow’s behavior required. She strode toward the indicated doorway. She might have to come back for a key; and besides, she preferred to be polite.

  Tovera, ahead of her, had opened the door with no difficulty and peered in. “The only light is glowstrips in the ceiling,” she said when Adele joined her. “Not many, and they’re dusty.”

  “It will serve,” Adele said. The basement appeared to be as deep as the ground floor ceilings were high. She started down the metal stairs.

  “I’ll wait here in the hall, mistress,” Tovera said, being more formal than usual because others might overhear the conversation. “I don’t think you’ll need my expertise in this venue.”

  “I agree,” Adele said as the door closed above her. Tovera meant that her mistress wouldn’t need a bodyguard in this dim, barren expanse of concrete pillars and accumulated trash.

  Unless a pack of dust-mites attacked, perhaps. No doubt Tovera would rush down when she heard Adele begin shooting at mites. Otherwise, Tovera sitting in the hall outside the door was in a better position to defend her mistress than she would have been down here in the gloom.

  The stacks of books were at some distance from the bottom of the staircase, and they were in much better order than Adele had expected to find them. Broken furniture and odds and ends of other trash—sports equipment, a perambulator with three wheels; similar items—had accumulated around the staircase over the years, but book movers had cleared a path through it so that they could place their loads near a wall and even cover them with plastic sheeting.