Read The Sea Without a Shore Online
Authors: David Drake
The Sea Without a Shore (8 page)
“The Upper Cephisis River Valley is a mining region,” said Cleveland. He didn’t appear to be put out by Daniel pressing him. “At the time Pantellaria and its colonies joined the Alliance—”
He paused and smiled. Daniel smiled back.
“—the Transformationist Assembly, which is legally a corporation, refiled its land claim under Alliance law. This was simply a precaution.”
And a very wise one,
Daniel thought. The Transformationists might be religious loonies, but they were neither stupid nor politically naive.
“Among the information deposited along with the claim was a certified assay of Pearl Valley showing that neither copper nor any other ore is present in significant amounts. This isn’t required for a claim, of course, but I presume it was done to turn away Alliance bureaucrats who might assume that we—that the Assembly of the day—was sitting on vast mineral wealth.”
“That sort of thing has been known to happen,” Daniel said.
And not only
when the new overlords came from Pleasaunce
. Greedy administrators were a reality of imperial rule, and the Republic of Cinnabar was as surely an empire as the Alliance was.
“I looked at the file,” Cleveland said. “As well as the assays, it contained a microwave scan of the subsurface rocks. While I was still on Cinnabar, I’d been employed by an engineering firm owned by a friend of my mother.”
He smiled ruefully. “Not employed very long, of course,” he said, “but I picked up some rudiments. There was an object thirty feet down in the rock, small—no larger than a man’s head—but of a very irregular shape. The scan proceeded down the full length of the valley, which allowed the computer to create three-dimensional models. The software couldn’t model this, however.”
Adele didn’t look up, but her wands had paused. Knowing her habits, Daniel suspected she had a realtime image of Cleveland’s face inset on her holographic display, just as she did while talking with others on the bridge of a starship.
“All right,” said Daniel. “You’ve found an anomaly in the ground. Why do you believe it’s a treasure?”
Cleveland nodded, smiling again. He’d gained his first point.
“Do you know anything about the settlement of Corcyra?” he asked.
“I know a little,” Daniel said. And by now Adele probably knew quite a lot, but he didn’t say that aloud. “It was settled from Pantellaria about five hundred years ago, initially as a farming colony. The copper deposits were discovered shortly thereafter. Corcyra became a major mining center—as it remains today.”
“That’s the official story,” Cleveland said, nodding.
“It’s the true story,” Daniel said, frowning. “The records of the discovery, the minutes of the Council of Pantellaria approving the colony, the names of all thirty-seven hundred colonists in the initial migration—they all exist. I’ve seen them, and I believe my colleague can show them to you right now if you’re in doubt.”
“I could,” said Adele without looking up. “But I suspect Master Cleveland is referring to the legend that there was a Pre-Hiatus settlement on Corcyra before the Pantellarians arrived.”
“Yes, Lady Mundy,” Cleveland said, turning his eyes toward Adele for the first time. “Though not Pre-Hiatus—I don’t know of any evidence supporting that belief. But I believe I’ve found evidence that Corcyra was settled from Bay about eight hundred years ago, long before Pantellaria discovered the planet and sent its colony.”
Adele’s wands danced like the surface of a pond in a rainstorm. She said, “Bay settled Ischia in the Ribbon Stars eight hundred years ago. That was the only colony ship which Bay sent out. Before end of the century, Bay had collapsed into civil war from which its civilization never recovered. The factions were using fusion bombs, and they stopped fighting simply because the infrastructure could no longer support weapons more advanced than spear throwers.”
“The colony ship from Bay, the
Coalsack 5747
, was under Captain Pearl,” Cleveland said. “That’s correct, isn’t it?”
“Yes,” Adele said. “The only further data I have on the venture is that there were some thirteen thousand settlers.”
“Cleveland,” said Daniel. He hoped he kept the sudden concern out of his voice. “Did you get this idea of a treasure because the captain’s name is the same as that of the valley your church is set up in?”
If the boy had done something so silly, the whole business was absurd—and he was probably too deluded to listen to reason. Much as Daniel would like to help the Sands—
“No, Captain Leary,” Cleveland said with a smile of calm amusement. He was, after all, Daniel’s senior by a year or two. “The coincidence of names caused me to look into Ischian history, however. There was a surprising amount of information available on Corcyra, since the planets are neighbors and Ischia was a major trading partner of Corcyra and of Pantellaria as well.”
“You have the advantage of me there,” Daniel said. He felt embarrassed, even though he hadn’t actually said anything insulting about Cleveland’s intelligence or common sense. “I know nothing of the other stars in the Ribbon Cluster, save Pantellaria.”
“Captain Pearl landed on Ischia as planned and disembarked the colonists,” Cleveland said. “He and the crew were to be colonists also, in the normal fashion of colony ships. Ordinarily the ship, the
Coalsack 5747
, would have been cannibalized for the colony’s use, but there were two factions within the colonists. Not long after landing on Ischia, Captain Pearl lifted off again with most of the crew and about a thousand of the original colonists. The
Coalsack 5747
was never heard of again.”
“Bloody hell,” said Daniel. He shook his head, feeling a little queasy at the implications of what Cleveland had said. “I’m not surprised the ship disappeared. It may not have made it into orbit after liftoff. Colony ships are huge, and they’re not built for repeated liftoffs and landings.”
“Was the division among the colonists due to the religious arguments which led to the civil war that broke out on Bay a generation later?” Adele said. For politeness’ sake, she looked at Cleveland this time as she spoke.
“I don’t know, Lady Mundy,” Cleveland said. “My source here is an Ischian history which I suspect was intended as a school text. What it says is that Captain Pearl and his confederates stole a great treasure.”
“Could that not have been the ship itself?” Adele said. “The cargo had largely been landed when Pearl lifted off again, but the loss of the ship must have been a great handicap to the new colony.”
“The
Coalsack
may have been the treasure, certainly,” Cleveland agreed. “Nothing else appearing, I might assume that it was. But there’s the buried anomaly in the Pearl Valley.”
“The fact that the ship lifted from Ischia doesn’t prove that it landed on Corcyra,” Daniel said, but his tone was mild. He was becoming intrigued, more or less despite himself. “As I say, it may well have broken up on Ischia.”
“Not in sight of the ground,” Cleveland said. “I’m sure from the tone of the history that it would have been recorded as the just retribution of Providence on the traitors.”
Daniel nodded in understanding. Adele raised her eyes again and said, “I would like to see this history, if I may.”
“The original is waiting at the door with Gillfin,” Cleveland said. He was gaining assurance as the interview went on. “Your reputation preceded you, Lady Mundy. I made a copy, but you may be able to learn things from the original which have escaped me.”
It struck Daniel that the boy must have inherited his mother’s intelligence as well as her strong jaw and broad forehead. His willowy height, however, owed nothing to Mistress Sand’s short, blocky frame.
“What decided me to return to Cinnabar and attempt to mount an expedition,” Cleveland said, “was the port computer at the capital, Brotherhood. It’s the main starport, where the river broadens and forms a pool at the base of the foothills.”
“Yes,” said Daniel, nodding cautiously.
“The computer comes from a starship,” Cleveland said. “I know, that’s common: a computer which can calculate navigation in the Matrix has more capacity than any use in normal space requires.”
“Yes,” said Daniel. “No matter how old it is.”
“This computer—it’s in the Manor, Brotherhood’s government building,” Cleveland went on. “This computer was manufactured on Bay. And nothing so sophisticated has been manufactured on Bay for the past seven hundred years.”
Adele’s wands were in quivering motion. “I’ll want to see the computer,” she said to her display. “Will that be possible?”
“I don’t think it would be difficult if you were in Brotherhood,” Cleveland said. “It certainly wasn’t for me.”
He cleared his throat and added, sounding diffident again, “May I ask a question, please? Does your question mean that you’re thinking of investing in the expedition?”
“You’ve convinced me to provide the ship and crew for the expedition at my own expense,” Daniel said. He assumed that was what Adele intended, but it didn’t matter. She had made him lead, so she would back him whatever her personal opinion. “I’ll talk to Mistress Sand. I expect that she can outfit the vessel from her own resources, so there’s no need of outside investors. We’ll need a cargo, you see, and she’s well-placed to provide it.”
He smiled at Cleveland and rose to his feet. “You’ve found the, well—the treasure, we’ll call it for now. For that you’ll keep a third. Your mother will get a third. And I will get the remaining third. Can we shake on a partnership on those terms?”
He offered his hand.
Cleveland stood, looking stunned. “Captain Leary,” he said. “This is very fair, more than fair. But I’ve already discussed arrangements with Captain Sorley of the freighter
Madison Merchant
. He has been willing to carry me if I indemnified him against loss in a war zone. That’s why I asked Mother for financial help.”
“I don’t know Captain Sorley,” Daniel said, his mind racing through possibilities. “Have you signed a contract yet?”
“Based on his record,” Adele said, still seated and scrolling through data, “Captain Sorley has never kept a contract in his life. Of course I have only a few of his aliases. It could be that under other names he’s more honest.”
“What?” said Cleveland. He slowly extended his arm, though he continued to stare at Adele.
Daniel grasped his hand and shook it firmly. “There, partner,” he said. “I’ll keep you informed of developments. I don’t think it will be long before we can lift from here and get to work.”
Adele rose to her feet and slipped her data unit into its pocket.
“Yes,” she said. “And Master Cleveland? I strongly advise you not to discuss the matter further with Captain Sorley. He is a liar, and a thief, and very probably a murderer. You would soil yourself by spitting in his face. Do I make myself clear?”
“Ah,” Cleveland said, “Lady Mundy, we Transformationists attempt to find good in every human being.”
Adele stepped briskly toward the door. “I told you that Sorley was
probably
a murderer,” she said over her shoulder. “That benefit of the doubt was all the good I could find regarding the man.”
Daniel, still smiling, nodded to Cleveland. He followed Adele out.
CHAPTER 6
Bergen and Associates Shipyard, Cinnabar
A shipyard crew was replacing the
Kiesche
’s High Drive nacelles under Mon’s direction. A wrench made the hull ring with a burst of impacts. Adele supposed she should think of Mon as manager instead of lieutenant as she continued to do.
She smiled mentally. For all that Mon’s present was one of plump success, she suspected that he still considered an RCN officer to be of higher rank than a wealthy businessman.
Another team from the yard was replacing the original purging system of the
Kiesche
’s plasma cannon with a much higher capacity unit salvaged from a four-inch gun. Sun, Daniel’s longtime gunner, was on the bridge to oversee the work. The workmen didn’t appear to need much oversight, and Sun, to his credit, wasn’t interfering.
The third group of workmen wore coveralls without markings and were upgrading the
Kiesche
’s sensor and commo suites. There were two women on the bridge and three men out on the hull. They came from Mistress Sand’s organization; Adele hadn’t bothered asking what their cover identities were.
As expected, they didn’t need any more help than those working on the plasma cannon did. Adele was, nonetheless, present. Like Sun, she was keeping her mouth shut.
Because the bridge was crowded by men who had removed an access plate to repipe the purging system—it squirted liquid nitrogen into the cannon between shots, cooling the bore—and by the women who were working on the command console, Adele was at one of the workstations at the rear bulkhead.
Sun stood at the other, but he wasn’t watching the flat-plate display. He turned to Adele and said, “Do you know what they’re doing to your rig on the hull, mistress?”
“Not really,” said Adele, looking up to the man standing beside her. “As much as they can without it being externally obvious, I suppose. I’m not a hardware expert, as you know.”
She didn’t suggest that he talk to the crew doing the work, because she knew they wouldn’t tell him anything. She wasn’t sure they would tell
her
anything beyond “I’m afraid you’ll have to ask Mistress Sand, your ladyship.”
Sun, a close-cropped man in his early thirties, had the skill and experience to be gunner on a battleship. His formal rank on the
Princess Cecile
was gunner’s mate because corvettes like the
Sissie
had no slot for the exalted rank of gunner. As for tramp freighters like the
Kiesche
, in the rare instance when they had to fight it out with a pirate, the captain would probably control the gun.
“Did Six ask you to look over this installation, Sun?” Adele asked.
“No, ma’am, he didn’t,” Sun said with an unexpected look of concern. “I heard from a buddy here in yard that Six, well, ‘Captain Leary,’ he said, was fitting out a ship and they was fitting a bigger gun.”
He gestured to the bow. “Which they’re not, you know, but for lots of things a fifty-millimeter is better than a four-inch if it cycles fast enough. Which it does with this rig. Nobody’s going to be shooting missiles at a tramp like this, right?”
“I don’t imagine they will,” Adele said, answering out of politeness. She had no more knowledge—or concern—about the question than she did on what the must-have fashion accessory for the season’s debutantes was.
If a missile, tons of metal moving at a measurable fraction of light speed, squarely struck the
Kiesche
or even a battleship, everybody aboard would be vaporized. There was nothing a signals officer could do to prevent that from happening, so Adele didn’t think about the possibility. If it happened, she would be beyond all care.
“Well, anyway, I dropped by the yard to watch,” Sun said. He frowned and then blurted, “Ma’am, you don’t think Six plans to leave me behind, do you? Because, well, he didn’t call me before he started this.”
He gestured again.
“I don’t know what Six intends for crew,” Adele said carefully, because she really didn’t know. “This business—”
She turned up her right hand.
“—the antennas and the rest of it, they were decided less than twenty-four hours ago. That I can tell you of my own knowledge.”
Sun sighed with obvious relief. “Well, maybe he just didn’t have time,” he said. “Though, ma’am? When you see him, you’ll put in a good word for me, won’t you? I won’t let you down, I swear it!”
“You never have in the past, Sun,” Adele said truthfully. She didn’t answer the precise question, however. She would no more interfere with Daniel’s decisions on personnel than she would try to plot a course through the Matrix.
“Ah, Sun?” she said, since the gunner clearly wanted to talk. “A ship like this doesn’t carry a dedicated gunner, of course. I would think that even in peacetime you could find a place with much higher status.”
“Higher than sailing with Six, ma’am?” Sun said. “That’s a joke! Why, I’ll bet there’s not a gunner on a battleship, senior warrant officer or not, who’s earned a quarter as much as I’ve made from prize money sailing on the
Sissie
!”
He grinned ruefully and said, “Mind, it didn’t stick to my fingers very well, but that’d be true of battleship pay, too, for me at least. And status, that’s not something you buy with florins anyway. Ma’am, I’m a Sissie, and there’s not an RCN bar on Cinnabar where that won’t buy me free drinks for as long as I can lift my arm to pour them down.”
One of the workmen installing the purging system turned. He was a grizzled, heavy-set man with an artificial left foot.
“Amen to that, spacer!” he said, then went back to tightening a clamp.
Adele remembered that the fellow’s name was Hodson, a Tech 2 who’d lost his foot when a broken line swung a Stellite thruster nozzle wide as it was being replaced. That was on Sexburga, years before.
I wasn’t thinking of them as people,
Adele realized. She had been talking to Sun as though the others on the bridge were images on a display.
Sun cleared his throat. Very possibly to turn the subject away from a disturbing one to which only Daniel could give an answer, he said, “What’s that you’re looking at, ma’am? She’s not the
Kiesche
, is she?”
Adele glanced at the flat-plate display. She’d been accessing the main console through her personal data unit, but the bulkhead display was echoing the data she had called up.
“No,” she said. She switched to an external viewpoint—a harbor-control camera.
“This is the
Madison Merchant
in Portinga Harbor. An acquaintance of mine was thinking of sailing on it. I decided to see what sort of ship it was while I’m waiting here.”
“You can read the diagnostics board of a ship in Portinga Harbor?” Sun said in amazement.
“Yes,” said Adele. She didn’t add, “You’re seeing the data, so obviously I can do that.” Sun was a good man and a shipmate, and he was quite skilled in his own specialty.
Sun frowned at the realtime image of the ship. “Ma’am, could you flip back to the diagnostics?” he said.
“Yes,” said Adele, doing so with a minute twitch of the wand in her left hand. “Is something wrong?”
“Ma’am, with a tramp freighter it’d be a miracle if there wasn’t something wrong,” said the gunner. “Right here, though …”
He looked at Adele with an expression of great concern. “Ma’am,” he said, “I don’t know how good a friend this guy is. But if you care about him, I’d say you ought to tell him not to ship aboard this
Madison Merchant
. There’s a lot of things about a ship that you’ve got to eyeball. Computers won’t tell you how much metal’s left on the thruster nozzles or the wear on the High Drive motors. But look at the pumps here!”
Adele followed Sun’s pointing finger. “It appears to say fifteen percent flow,” she said. “But the ship is sitting in harbor, so it’s just keeping the reaction mass tanks topped off, isn’t it? Doesn’t most of the water go straight back into the harbor?”
“Right, right,” said Sun, “that’s the flow. But you’re not looking at the pump output up here, see?”
“A moment, please,” Adele said crisply. Even with Sun pointing again, it took her a moment; the data captions weren’t meaningful to her. “This one?” She highlighted a line. “Eighty-three percent?”
“That’s it,” said Sun. “Anything over eighty percent is in the red zone, and they’re only managing fifteen percent flow from that output. Ma’am, it’s not just that it’s crap performance. It means that the pump’s failing. Pretty quick it’s going to quit dead, and where are you then if you’re landing the sorts of places that a ship like this one lands?”
The little gunner drew himself up with a look of moral outrage, like a priest objecting to the sinfulness of the times. “That was my specialty before I struck for gunner, you know, ma’am?” he said. “Tech 2, Fluid Systems Specialty.”
“I did not know,” Adele said, switching back to the external view of the freighter. “I assure you, I will inform my friend in the strongest possible terms that he should not travel aboard the
Madison Merchant
.”
As indeed I have already done,
Adele thought as she closed the connection.
* * *
Woetjans tilted one of the bank of windows on the outer wall of the fifth-floor office so that she could see the shipyard’s pool without looking through glass. Grimy glass, Daniel noticed. He suspected that Mon spent as little time as possible in this office even when he hadn’t lent it to Daniel and his bosun to put together a crew list.
“For riggers, I’ll just see who hasn’t shipped out since the
Sissie
landed,” Woetjans said, rubbing her big knuckles together. She was six feet six inches tall, rangy, and stronger than any man of her size whom Daniel had met. “We’ll have our pick.”
Woetjans was also as ugly as a weathered fencepost. She and the riggers which she as bosun commanded worked in suits stiffened with fiberglass armor—hard suits—to protect them from the punctures otherwise certain when they were moving quickly among the raw edges and broken wires of a starship’s rigging.
Rigging suits were a better alternative than watching your air supply vanish into the Matrix, but on the inside they pinched and rubbed the wearer’s every projecting body part from the forehead to the toes. Woetjans’ skin was worn into calluses on cheeks, knuckles and doubtless many of the places which her clothes covered. While that didn’t greatly detract from the bosun’s appearance, it certainly didn’t help.
“I’m only offering standard wages, you know,” Daniel said doubtfully. Spacers weren’t in desperately short supply as they had been for decades while the fleets of Cinnabar and the Alliance battled across the length and breadth of the human universe. Still, every member of the
Sissie
’s crew was exceptionally skilled. They wouldn’t have any difficulty finding berths.
“And I don’t want you telling them that they’ll have shares in a treasure,” he added. Though they would, of course,
if
there were a treasure. “Cleveland believes the treasure exists and maybe his mother does, mothers being as they are, but
I
don’t. I’m going to babysit the boy as a favor to a friend. And a friend of Adele’s. Lady Mundy’s.”
“I guess any of those things’d be reason enough,” Woetjans said, returning to the console where Daniel sat. “A friend of yours or the mistress, I mean. And I don’t care what you say—if the people who’ve sailed with you in the past hear that you’re going to look for a treasure, they’ll be sure they’re going to find one. No matter
how
you warn them.”
Daniel sucked in his lips and nodded agreement. “I know,” he said, “but they’re wrong. Well, they’re all adults.”
He grinned. “As much as I am, anyway. And I guess telling the Sissies that we’re going into a war zone and it’ll be dangerous wouldn’t put any of them off, either.”
He felt his muscles tighten. “By Hell and all its demons, we’ve been through some hard places together,” he said. “I’ll tell the
world
we have!”
And that was the key: been through. The surviving Sissies believed that because of what they’d survived in the past, they didn’t need to fear anything that might happen in the future. That was nonsense; logically they knew how many of their former shipmates had been killed or maimed during the years they had sailed under Daniel Leary—under Six, his communications identifier.
But superstition has a bigger part than logic in the way spacers view their world; and Daniel, a spacer to the marrow of his bones, felt the same childish confidence.
“That leaves us the ship side,” Daniel said. He brought up that portion of the crew list of the
Princess Cecile
at the moment she landed on Cinnabar after the recent operations in the Macotta Region.
Daniel had wondered whether the Bergen and Associates office would have a decent computer. In fact it had a console salvaged from the
Milton
, similar to the one on the
Kiesche
’s bridge. As he rode up the elevator to this top floor, he had noticed the bracing Mon had added to the building. When he saw the massive console, he understood why.
The bosun as chief of rig was responsible for all the personnel whose duties were on the exterior of the hull during operations. Woetjans knew the riggers personally, their strengths and weaknesses.
The ship’s internal workings were the province of technicians under the chief engineer, the chief of ship. The captain and bosun knew the technicians by sight, but they didn’t have the intimate knowledge of them that Pasternak had. He had been chief engineer on the
Milton
and since then on the
Princess Cecile
, though a corvette was far smaller than the normal berth of so senior an engineer.
“Can Pasternak help us?” Woetjans said. “I figure we only need two, three techs on a ship this size, right?”
“I intend to sign on four,” Daniel said firmly. Every spacer on the ship side was one fewer under Woetjans. “And any Academy graduate will be able to turn a hand to the fusion bottle. We’ll have several officers besides me.”
He stretched at the console. “I’m hoping to get a response from Pasternak today with his recommendations,” he said. “To tell the truth, I was hoping to hear something yesterday, but I don’t know how well Pasternak keeps up with message traffic when he’s relaxing at home. I gather he’s something of a celebrity in Wassail County, where he comes from.”