Hope Renewed (59 page)

The castle was still there. And it was the garrison HQ for the Bassin du Sud military district. The curtain walls and moats and arrowslits weren’t all that relevant anymore, but there were heavy shore-defense mortars in the courtyards, Land-made breechloaders, capable of commanding the harbor if the plotters consolidated their hold on the garrison.

A tall man with a swag belly clattered down the staircase; he had a police carbine over his shoulder and a pistol thrust through the sash around his waist.

“Jean!” he roared genially, and came toward John with open arms for the hug and kiss on both cheeks that was the standard friendly greeting in the Union. At the last moment he recoiled.

John looked down briefly at his shirt. “Most of it’s other people’s blood,” he said helpfully.

“Name of a dog! You were caught in the street fighting?”

John nodded. “Nearly got massacred by some soldiers with car-mounted machine guns, but somebody dropped dynamite on them. There seem to be a lot of explosions going on today.” He jerked his head towards the doors leading out onto the plaza.

“My faith, yes,” the mayor of Bassin du Sud said happily. “Copper miners. I . . . ah . . . arranged for a special train to bring in a few hundred of them from up in the hills. Ingenious fellows, aren’t they?”

John nodded. They were also anarchists almost to a man, those that weren’t members of the radical wing of the
Travailleur
party. A few years ago, when the Conservatives had been in power, they’d taken up arms in a revolt halfway between a damned violent strike and outright revolution. The government had turned General Libert’s Legionnaires and Errife loose on them when the regular army couldn’t put the insurrection down.

“You’re going to need more than dynamite and hunting shotguns to get the garrison out of the castle. Especially if you want to do it before Libert arrives. What’ve you got in the way of ships to stop him crossing?”

“Three cruisers were lost.”

“I saw it. Sabotage?’

The mayor nodded. “Time bombs in the magazines, we think. But there’s one corsair-class commerce raider, and some torpedo boats. There were nothing but merchantmen in Errif harbor at last report.”

“That’s last report. He may shuttle men over by air. Chosen ‘volunteers’ under ‘private contract.’ In fact, I wouldn’t put it past the Chosen to escort his troopships in with a squadron of cruisers.”

“That would mean war!” The mayor’s natural olive changed to a pasty gray. “War with the Republic.”

“Not if they could claim a local government invited them in.”

“Nobody could—”

“
Mon ami,
you don’t know what Santander lawyers are like. They could argue the devil into the Throne of God—or at least tie everything up on the question for a year or better. Which is why you have to get some transport down to my ship; she’s stuffed to the gills with rifles, machine guns, ammunition, explosives, mortars, and field-guns.”

Jean-Claude nodded decisively. “
Bon.
” He turned and began to shout orders.

Gerta Hosten put her eye to a crack in the worn planks of the boathouse. It was crowded, with the half-dozen Chosen commandos and the fishing boat pulled up on the ways, and the stink of old fish was soaked into the oak and pine timbers. The rubber skinsuit she was wearing was hot and clammy out of the water; she shrugged back the weight of the air tank on her back and peered down the docks.

“Still burning nicely,” she said, looking over to the naval dockyards. “The storehouses and wharfs are burning, too. Considerate of the enemy to use wooden hulls.”

Obsolete, but this was a complete backwater in military terms. All the Union’s few modern warships were up in the Gut, and it would take weeks to bring any down here. By then this action would be settled, one way or another. Her companions were too well disciplined to cheer, but a low mutter of satisfaction went through them. Then someone spoke softly:

“Native coming.” They wheeled and crouched, hands reaching for weapons. “It’s ours.”

The Unionaise knocked at the door, three quick and then two at longer intervals. One of the commandos opened it enough for him to sidle in; he looked around at the hard-set faces and swallowed uneasily.

“What news, Louis?” Gerta said, in his language. She spoke all four of Visager’s major tongues with accentless fluency.

“Our men are pinned in the garrison and the seafront batteries,” he said. “The
syndicistes
are slaughtering everyone they can catch—everyone wearing a gentleman’s cravat, even, priests, nuns . . .”

The Chosen shrugged. What else would you do, when you had the upper hand in a situation like this? Louis swallowed and went on:

“And they are handing out arms to all the rabble of the city.”

“Where are they getting them?” Gerta asked. According to the last reports, most of the weapons in Bassin du Sud were in the castle or the fortified gun emplacements that guarded the harbor mouth.

“There is a Santander ship in dock, one that came in a few days ago but did not unload. The cargo is weapons, all types—fine modern weapons. They are handing them out at the dock and sending wagons and trucks full of others all around the city.”

“Damn,” Gerta swore mildly. That
would
put a spanner in the gears. “Show me.”

She unfolded a waterproof map of the harbor and spread it on the gunwale of the fishing boat. Louis bent over it, squinting in the half darkness until she moved it to a spot where a sliver of sunlight fell through the boards.

“Here,” he said, tapping a finger down. “Quay Seven, Western Dock.”

“Hmmm.” Gerta measured the distance between her index and little fingers and then moved them down to the scale at the bottom of the map. “About half a mile, say three-quarters, as we’ll swim.”

Bassin du Sud had a harbor net, but like all harbors the filth and garbage in the water attracted marine life. And on Visager, marine life meant death more often than not. They’d already lost two members of the team.

“Nothing for it,” she said. “Hans, Erika, Otto, you’ll come with me. The rest of you, launch the boat and bring it
here.
” She tapped a finger on the map; the others crowded around to memorize their positions. “Function check now.”

Everyone went over everyone else’s air tanks, regulators, and other gear. Hard hat suits with air pumped down a hose had been in use for fifty or sixty years, but this equipment was barely out of the experimental stage.

“Air pressure.”

“Check.”

“Regulator and hose.”

“Check.”

“Spear-bomb gun.”

“Check.”

“Mines.”

“Check and ready.”

The last of the foot-thick disks went into the teardrop-shaped container, and the man in charge of it adjusted the internal weights that kept it at neutral buoyancy Gerta pulled the goggles down over her face and put the rubber-tasting mouthpiece between her lips. She checked her watch: 18:00 hours, two hours until sunset. Ideal, if nothing held them up seriously. Lifting her feet carefully to avoid tripping on her fins, she waded into the water.

The
Merchant Venture
had her deck-guns manned and ready when John leapt off the running board of the truck and down onto the dock at the foot of the gangway. She also had full steam up and her deck-cranes rigged to unload cargo.

“Go!” John said, trotting towards the deck.

“Is that
you,
sir?” Barrjen blurted.

The blood on his face must look even more ghastly now that it had a chance to dry.

“Not mine,” he said again. “Get the first load down on the dock,” he went on. “Get some crewmen up here and form a chain to hand rifles and bandoliers down to anyone who comes up and asks for one.”

The ex-marine blinked at that, but slung his own weapon and began barking orders. It was a relief sometimes, having someone who didn’t
argue
with you all the time.

Stevedores were pushing rail flats onto the tracks alongside the Santander merchant ship; Jean-Claude had gotten them out of the fighting and moving fast enough. Steam chugged and a winch whirred with a smell of scorched castor oil on the deck ahead of the ship’s central island bridge. The crates coming out of the hold were the heavier stuff: field-guns and mortars and their ammunition. More trucks were arriving, honking their air-bulb horns, and growing crowds of people with Assault Guards to shove them into some sort of line.

“Damndest fucking way—begging your pardon, sir—I’ve ever seen of unloading a ship,” Adams, the vessel’s first mate, said unhappily.

“No alternative at present,” John said.

He lifted his eyes to the hills.
Chateau du Sud
was invisible from here, all but the pepperpot roof of one of the towers. That gave them direct observation for the fall of shot, though; and those 240mm
Schlenki Emma
up there could drop their shells right through the deck. When the stored ammunition and explosives went off, it would make the destruction of the Unionaise cruisers earlier in the day look like a fart in a teacup.

Long narrow crates full of rifles and short square ones full of ammunition began going down the gangways hand to hand, then out into the eager crowd. John restrained an impulse to get into the chain and swing some weight, and another to look up at the castle again. Nothing he could do now but wait. At least there was also nothing the rebels or their Chosen backers could do to him either, except fire those guns . . . and they didn’t seem to suspect what was going on. Yet.

The harbor water was murky and dark, tasting of oil and rot. Gerta felt the reach of the tentacle before she saw it, flicking up from the mud and scattered debris of the bottom, thick as a big man’s arm and coated on one side with oval suckers and barbed bone hooks. The back of it buffeted her aside, tumbling her through the water like a stick. It wrapped itself around Hans Dieter with the snapping quickness of a frog’s tongue closing around a fly. Then it jerked him downward, screaming through the muffling water. Blood and gouting air bubbles trailed behind him; so did the streamlined container of limpet mines, anchored by a stout cord to his waistbelt.

Scheisse,
Gerta thought.

Her body reacted automatically, stabilizing her spin, jackknifing and plunging downward as fast as her fins could drive her. The darkness grew swiftly, but the creature was moving upward with its strike. Ten meters long, a torpedo shape with a three-lobed tail; the mouth had three flaps as well, fringed with teeth like ivory spikes around a rasping sucker tongue, with a huge reddish eye above each. The tentacles were threefold. A second had closed around Hans’ legs, pulling his legs loose from his torso and guiding them into the sausage-machine maw. The third lashed out at her.

She whirled, poising the speargun, and fired. A slug of compressed air sent the bulbous-headed spear flashing down and kicked her back; she could feel the
schunnnk
as the mechanism cycled in her hands. The spear slammed into the base of the tentacle just as the hooks slashed through her skinsuit and tore at her flesh. She shouted into the rubber of the mouthpiece, tasting water around it, and curled herself into a ball. The shock of the explosion thumped at her, sending her spinning off into the murky water.

It had been muffled by flesh. There was inky-looking blood all around her. She extended arms and legs frantically to kill the spin. That saved her life; the long shape of the killer piscoid floundered by where she would have been, flailing the water with its two intact tentacles, mouth gaping. Gerta fought to control her speargun while the creature bent itself double to attack again. There was a crater in the rubbery flesh where its third tentacle had been, gouting blood into the water, but that didn’t seem to be fazing it much. The mouth opened as broad as the reach of her arms, the other two tentacles trailing back in its wake and still holding bits of Hans. Some crazed corner of her mind wondered if it was coming
at
her or
up
at her or
down . . .

No matter. One last chance . . . she fired.

The mouth closed in reflex as something entered it. Swallowing was equally automatic. This time she had a perfect view of the consequences. The smooth body behind the eyes was as thick as her own torso. Now it belled out like a gun barrel fired when the weapon’s muzzle was stuffed with dirt. The mouth flew open the way a flower did in stop-motion photography, with bits and pieces of internal organ and of Hans Dieter shooting out at her. The predator fish drifted downward, quivering and jerking as its nervous system fired at random.

Got to get
out
of here,
she thought. The blood and vibrations would attract scavengers from all over the harbor. And then:
Where are the mines?

Otto swam up pulling the container, Gerta felt her shoulders unknot in relief, enough that she was dizzy and nauseous for an instant before control clamped down. It had been so
quick . . .
and Hans had been a good troop. She grabbed a handhold on the other side of the container and signaled to Elke with her free hand, telling her to take over the watch. It would be faster with two pulling, and they’d lost time.

The additional risk was something they’d just have to take.

“About half done,” John said to himself.

He half turned to speak to Adams when the deck surged under his feet. Water spouted up between the dock and the hull, a fountain surge that drenched the whole front of the ship. Seconds later the hull shuddered again, and another mass of water fell across her midships; and a third, this time at the stern. Dead sea-things bobbed to the surface.

John looked up reflexively. But there had been no sound of a heavy shell dropping across the sky.
Torpedo?
his mind gibbered. There wasn’t more than a yard or two between dock and hull . . .

a mine,
Center said.
attached to the hull by strong magnets, put in place by divers with artificial breathing apparatus. probability approaches unity.

Crewmen vomited out of the hatches, screaming. A second wave came a few seconds later, dripping and sodden with seawater, some of them dragging wounded crewmates. John stood staring blankly, fists squeezing at either side of his head. Then the deck began to tilt towards the quayside, scores of tons of water dragging the port rail down. His ears rang, so loudly that for a moment he couldn’t hear Barrjen’s shouted questions.