The Sea Without a Shore Read online

  If caught was the right word.

  “The volcano must have brought it up,” Daniel said. Adult floorfish meandered across the bottom at three thousand feet or deeper, though their eggs hatched in marshes and the sprats spent their first two years in coastal waters. “It’s sixty feet long if it’s an inch.”

  “And the flesh is no good for anything but feeding pigs,” Hogg said with a tone of regret. “Even if we could land it.”

  He adjusted his controller again.

  The floorfish continued to quiver, so Daniel didn’t rise from his knees. There wasn’t any real risk. When Hogg released the lure, the fish—it was really a blanket with a mouth at one end and a body filled by the gut which processed ooze that the mouth sucked in—would sink back to the bottom.

  Daniel grinned. The worst danger that the floorfish posed was that if it didn’t find its way back out to sea soon, the warmth and higher oxygen content of the surface waters would probably kill it. In that case, its many tons of rotting flesh and partially digested ooze would make a considerable area uninhabitable until the process was complete. Fortunately, nobody except hunters and sport fishermen spent much time in this swampy portion of Bantry.

  The fish continued to wobble like a huge jelly while Hogg stabbed at his controller. “It won’t release!” he snarled. “I don’t know if something’s corroded or the probes are just too deep in that thick hide.”

  He stuck his hand into a baggy pocket and brought out a folding knife with a knuckleduster hilt; the blade snicked open. “I say we cut the line and chalk it up to experience.”

  “Do you have another lure?” Daniel said.

  Hogg shrugged. “Back to the manor,” he said. “We’ve got three sprats now in the cold chest. That’s enough for dinner; and if it’s not, well, me and Em—”

  That would be the Widow Brice.

  “—can find something else. She’s not big on fish anyhow.”

  That was all true, but …

  “I’ll fetch the lure,” Daniel said, swinging his right foot into the water carefully. “I was figuring to go in with the trident anyway.”

  He eased over the side by stages, gripping the gunwale with both hands and lowering himself carefully to reduce the splash. The water was noticeably warm; more sign of the volcanic disruption, he supposed.

  Hogg had leaned to his left instinctively to balance Daniel’s weight. “I can’t turn off the current or the fish’ll go right back to the bottom,” he said. “That means it’s going to keep on shivering like that.”

  “Right,” said Daniel, breast-stroking away from the skiff with his head out of the water. “Well, if it swallows me, you can cut me out with that knife of yours.”

  The weed wasn’t as thick as it looked from even a short distance away. The tendrils which bound palm-sized clumps into mats the size of a soccer pitch parted as easily as gauze between Daniel’s hands. He wouldn’t want to swim miles through the weed, but he thought he could if he had to. Twenty yards was no problem.

  The line of optical fiber was invisible except that when the sun caught it at the right angle it became a slash of light from the water to the lure on the black/brown skin. Daniel was probably brushing it as he swam/paddled toward the floorfish, but its touch went unnoticed in the weed.

  The floorfish had a fringe of fins all along its side. They extended about the length of Daniel’s forearm and were stiffened with cartilage, not spines. They appeared to undulate gently, but there was enough power behind the continuous motion to push at Daniel like a strong current when he was close enough to touch the fish.

  Daniel paused, then dived and came up like a sprat trying to escape a predator. His outstretched hand gripped the lure, and his weight pulled it free as he slid down the slimy side of the floorfish.

  “Master!” Hogg shouted. “Back away! Keep the bloody lure on your bare skin and in the water between you, okay? Don’t bloody argue!”

  “Between” wasn’t a direction, but Hogg must mean the floorfish if he wanted Daniel to back away. The older man’s voice wasn’t panicked, but there was more stress in it than Daniel remembered since the night Hogg had readied the Bantry tenants against trouble that might sweep in from the darkness. He’d handed the seven-year-old Daniel Leary a shotgun and told him to aim for heads because face-shields weren’t as tough as the body-armor which the attackers might be wearing.

  No one came to Bantry that night. In the morning, Daniel and the others learned that Speaker Leary had drowned the Three Circles Conspiracy in blood, wiping out the leaders of the Popular Party and their families—save for a few of the proscribed who happened to be off planet at the time the crisis broke.

  One of those survivors was Adele Mundy, sixteen-year-old daughter of Lucius Mundy, the leader of the Popular Party. She had just left to study in the Academic Collections on Blythe. At the time, Adele’s name wouldn’t have meant anything to Daniel, or for that matter to Corder Leary. The girl was a scholar and wholly apolitical.

  Daniel, a newly made lieutenant, had met Adele, then Electoral Librarian on Kostroma, five years ago. That meeting had changed their lives. Both of them were better off by orders of magnitude than they would have been without the other’s support.

  The floorfish submerged like a mass of sludge slipping into the channel. Suction tugged at Daniel, but because the fish’s body shaped itself to the water, it was much less of a problem than what a sinking ship of similar size would have caused. The fish left behind an effluvium of ancient mud, cloying and slightly sulfurous.

  Something lifted briefly above the undulating weed, then slipped back. Daniel knew what Hogg had seen from the height of the boat.

  He knew why Hogg was worried, too.

  Daniel splashed, hoping that he was moving toward the boat as Hogg had ordered. It wasn’t a very effective way to proceed, but he wasn’t about to stretch his legs out behind him to backstroke properly. That would put his bare, kicking feet very close to the head of the wolf eel, and the predator’s jaws were armed with six-inch fangs.

  Wolf eels attached their sucker tails to floorfish. They didn’t harm or even affect the huge scavenger, but when the giant maw rooted up some lesser muck-dweller, the eel snatched it for a meal.

  This was an extremely large floorfish, even for an adult, and the eel was a similarly impressive member of its species. Because its jaws and belly expanded, it could easily ingest prey the size of an average-sized man.

  “I got the lure set to female eel,” Hogg said in a hoarse whisper. “If it figures you’re a female, it likely won’t try to eat you. Just keep coming back. I don’t want to foul the prop in the weed, but I will if I have to.”

  “I don’t especially want to be buggered by an eel, either,” Daniel said. It wasn’t a real concern—like other fish, the eels sprayed milt onto the eggs the female had just extruded into the sea—but it made Hogg chuckle, which is what Daniel had intended.

  Hogg would rather die than let anything harm the Young Master. Daniel didn’t want him to leap into the eel’s jaws as the best way of saving his charge.

  Daniel continued to splash. He didn’t look around. He couldn’t see anything through the agitated water. Perhaps Hogg could see more.

  They were using the lure’s field to override the bioelectrical field of Daniel’s own body. Hogg was, at least; it wouldn’t have occurred to Daniel to do that. He’d certainly think of it should the situation arise again.

  “Now, hold the lure in your left hand and hook your right over the gunnel,” Hogg said, speaking from just above Daniel’s head. He was again as calm as he had been years before while teaching his young charge to squeeze rather than jerk his trigger. “When you’re ready, you’ll swing up and I’ll haul you aboard. No problem at all for a strong young lad like you, right?”

  “No problem,” Daniel whispered. His attendance at temple was sporadic at best, but he really would try to improve in the future.

  Daniel’s hair brushed the skiff’s hull. He fumbled with his
right hand, bicycling his legs to keep him up until he could grip a thwart. He took a deep breath and another, consciously trying to slow his heart rate.

  He had only had one glimpse of the eel. It had seemed huge. Even allowing for the exaggeration of fear, it was probably ten feet long. Its slender body trailed behind a head the size of a bushel basket.

  Hogg gripped Daniel’s left arm, just above the elbow. He wasn’t putting any pressure on the contact yet.

  “On three,” Daniel said. “One, two, thr—”

  Water exploded as Daniel rolled up and over the gunwale. The eel must have come after him, because Hogg shouted and Daniel heard the crunch as Hogg’s right arm drove the trident through the bones of the creature’s skull.

  Daniel rolled into the belly of the skiff. Hogg had gotten out of his way, though Daniel wasn’t sure how. He wasn’t even sure he still had both legs, and his hands were locked together in mutual reassurance.

  Bloody Hell, that was a bad one!

  The skiff was rocking violently. Hogg shoved them backward and released the shaft of the harpoon. The little motor was backing with all the power it had available, ignoring the risk of weed clogging its intake.

  Daniel raised his head to look over the gunnel. The shaft flailed back and forth, sometimes under the surface, as the fatally injured eel curvetted. The body behind the soot-colored head was so nearly transparent that Daniel could make out the bones of the skeleton.

  His guess of ten feet long had been conservative. This eel was probably big enough to have swallowed the skiff itself along with the two men.

  “I wonder what the record for a wolf eel is?” Daniel said. “Taken by hand, I mean.”

  “You want this one as a trophy,” Hogg said hoarsely, “then you’re going to have to come back by yourself and get it. Me, I’m heading for home; and when I get there, I’m going to get very drunk.”

  “Yes,” said Daniel. “I think that’s a good plan for both of us.”

  Xenos on Cinnabar

  Lady Adele Mundy—she had been released from the RCN when her ship was paid off, so she could not properly use her naval rank of signals officer—stood before one of the chest-high reading tables in the Long Room of the Navy House Archives. Her personal data unit sat to the left on the table; to the right was the small stack of ships’ logs which she was copying; and in the center was a flat conversion device eight inches deep by ten inches across.

  The converter was a specialist item and would have cost a great deal to buy, even if she could have found one for sale. This one had been given her as an adjunct to her work for her other employer, Mistress Bernis Sand—the head of Cinnabar’s intelligence service, or at least one branch of it.

  Adele didn’t think she was flattering herself to believe that she was in her way Mistress Sand’s most effective agent. She was fairly certain that the intelligence arms of the Alliance of Free Stars, the Republic’s greatest rival and frequent enemy, would have agreed with that assessment.

  She put another log in the converter. This was a chip recording, but the format was unique in Adele’s experience and may not have been common some seven hundred years ago when, according to the label, the officers of a freighter out of Palafox created it.

  The converter whined for a moment, then projected the first entries through the data unit’s holographic display for Adele to view while the remainder of the contents was stored. She wasn’t trying to absorb all the data on the logs at this moment, but neither was she merely a copyist. She had repeatedly found cases where the labels slapped on quickly by disinterested clerks were seriously in error.

  Adele smiled faintly. The clerks probably thought that items which hadn’t been incorporated into the general database were of no value. It was true that the logs were valueless except to someone who was very skilled and very obsessive. Even the skilled, obsessive Adele Mundy was unlikely to find any data that she would use during the however many further years of her life.

  On the other hand, she had nothing better to do, and she liked gathering data. There was probably nothing she liked more.

  Tovera, Adele’s servant, stood at the desk to Adele’s left, nearer the entrance. Besides the clerk, a naval rating, they had been the only people present in the Long Room, but an RCN midshipman wearing her 2nd Class uniform—her Grays—had entered and was talking to the clerk.

  Tovera moved slightly, facing the doorway. She lifted the lid of the attaché case on her desk, just enough to reach inside.

  Adele was by now too familiar with Tovera’s ways to be surprised; she didn’t even smile. Tovera wasn’t precisely paranoid, but she saw no reason why an unfamiliar midshipman might not intend to kill her mistress; therefore she prepared against the possibility.

  After all, Tovera had nothing better to do either, and she had never cared about the reasons why she was told to kill someone. She had been trained by the Fifth Bureau, the intelligence service which reported directly to Guarantor Porra, the autocrat of the Alliance. Tovera had changed her allegiance from the Alliance to Adele Mundy personally, but she continued to follow her training.

  Tovera did most things by rote. She was a sociopath and far too intelligent to make social decisions for herself. She would have been executed long since if she had done that, because she generally saw the simplest way out of a problem as being to kill the person making the problem.

  So long as Tovera did as Adele directed, she would remain within socially acceptable norms. Thus far obeying Adele had given Tovera ample opportunity to kill people, which she liked to do as much as she could be said to like anything.

  “Well, Midshipman,” the clerk said, raising his voice enough to be heard where Adele stood, thirty feet away. “I guess despite your exalted rank, you’re going to have to check the catalogue just like lesser mortals. And for that you’ll have to go back up to the lobby, because the terminal down here’s on the blink.”

  “The catalogue only lists the logs of the Princess Cecile while the corvette was on the RCN list,” the midshipman said. “I know that she sailed a number of times in private commission, and I’ve heard that copies of those logs were deposited with Navy House also.”

  In theory, the midshipman ranked a naval rating. In practice, she was probably on half pay since so many ships had been laid up after the Treaty of Amiens, and nothing was of lower importance to the RCN bureaucracy than a midshipman on the beach.

  The clerk shrugged. “Could be, honey,” he said. “You’re welcome to look to your little heart’s content.”

  “Excuse me, mistress?” Adele called. She had personal experience with poverty, since the Mundy wealth had escheated to the Republic when her parents were executed; besides which, she disliked people who didn’t do their jobs. “If you’ll come back here, I may be able to help you.”

  As she had expected, her helpfulness irritated the clerk. He gave Adele a black look and returned to his desk display. He was watching a sporting event, though Adele—who had checked it out of habit—couldn’t imagine why a score of men (they were all men) were shoving a stone quoit up and down a grass field.

  This basement area of the archives was more a storage room than a library in proper form. Floor-to-ceiling cages of woven-wire fencing marched down both sides of the room. Inside each were file cabinets, but boxes of additional material were stacked on the floors of many cages, particularly those nearer the entrance.

  People using the archives could switch on direct lighting to supplement the glow strips in the arched concrete ceiling, but not all the lights worked. Specifically, the cage beside the desk where Adele was working didn’t have working internal lights. The unsorted boxes within were lumps in shadow.

  The midshipman strode past the clerk’s desk without looking back. She was petite and dark-haired, and she was obviously angry.

  “It’s ridiculous that an RCN officer has to depend on the courtesy of a private scholar to find something in RCN archives!” she said, probably hoping that her voice would carry to where t
he clerk sat. “Still, if you know where the logs might be stored, mistress, that’s the main thing. I’d be very grateful.”

  Her nametag read HALE. She had probably bought her Grays used, because they had more wear than someone only a few years out of the Academy was likely to have given them.

  “I think you’ll find them in there,” Adele said in a neutral voice, pointing. “In the second box down on the left-hand stack, the metal one. Tovera, help her with your handlight.”

  Tovera opened the wire gate and gestured the midshipman into the cage. They could be padlocked, but most of them were not.

  Hale followed Tovera’s narrow beam of light, lifted off the covering box, and took out the clear container within the one indicated.

  “Perfect!” Hale said after a glance. “They’re on RCN standard chips, and it looks like they’re all of them here. And in order!”

  Adele smiled faintly. A stranger like Hale probably wouldn’t have recognized the expression if she had even noticed it.

  Hale came out, and Tovera closed the cage behind her.

  “I suppose you’re wondering about these,” Hale said as she set the chips on a table across the aisle from Adele. She didn’t appear to have noticed Tovera. Adele’s servant excelled in being unobtrusive in any normal social setting. “You see, I was in the Academy with two midshipmen who were assigned to Captain Leary, only he wasn’t a captain then. You know—the famous one?”

  Tovera didn’t snicker. Adele nodded expressionlessly. She did indeed know Captain Leary.

  “Well, I knew them,” Hale said. She took an ordinary chip reader out of its belt pouch and set it on her table. “One was pretty sharp, I’ll grant, but the other always struck me as being as thick as two short planks. But they’ve both been promoted to lieutenant with no interest behind them.”

  She shrugged. “I’ve got a lot of time on my hands since the peace,” she said, “so I thought maybe if I studied the logbooks I could figure out how they did it. Besides being lucky to serve under Captain Leary, I mean.”