The Sea Without a Shore by David Drake Read Free Book Online Page A

helped him there, you know.”
    Daniel nodded.
    “He married Bernis and cut quite a swathe for a few years,” Sand said, his voice beginning to rasp. “They had a son, that’s Rikard. And then Cleveland went bust in a big way. He went up to the Oriel County property—to think, he said. And he drowned swimming in a lake there.”
    He spread his hands. “Well, it was ruled an accident, and why not?” he said. “And Bernis went around and took care of what was owing. Cleveland had been borrowing on securities that he was supposed to be holding for clients, I hear; but they were all taken care of. And I married Bernis.”
    “I believe you made a fortunate marriage,” Daniel said. That was true—for Sand. Mistress Sand was a very impressive woman, and she had been a considerable social step upward for a self-made contractor like Tom Sand. Age and—plain—looks aside, Daniel would rather have married the wolf eel.
    “The problem is the boy, Rikard,” Sand said. Then, bitterly, “He was fifteen and trouble when I met Bernis, he was worse bloody trouble all the time until he ran off three years ago, and now he’s back and says he’s reformed, damned if I don’t think he’s the worst trouble of all. Bloody kid!”
    “I don’t get along well with my father,” Daniel said. That was an understatement: he’d entered the RCN Academy at age sixteen after a screaming row with Corder Leary. That the episode hadn’t ended in murder showed that both men had better control than their closest associates would have guessed. “I can imagine that a stepson and stepfather have an even harder time.”
    “It was more than that,” Sand said, looking toward the pale horizon. He sounded despairing rather than angry. “He resented me for being an oik—Bernis remarried beneath her, you see. And he resented her for being alive. Cleveland drank a lot. When he took a swing at me with a bottle, I told Bernis to keep him out of my sight or I’d leave.”
    He looked at his big, scarred hands and grinned ruefully at Daniel. “That’s not how I’d have handled the problem with any other man alive,” he said.
    Daniel grinned back. He’d never doubted that Tom Sand had been raised in a tough school.
    “So after boarding school, Bernis got Cleveland jobs with family friends,” Sand said. “Hers and her first husband’s, not mine. I didn’t check up on him, but none of the jobs lasted long. Then about three years ago, he went off somewhere and Bernis didn’t hear anything from him. Well, he was twenty-four then, old enough to live his own life. Me, I was just glad he was out of mine.”
    Spray flashed white several hundred yards out to sea. Moments later came the slap of a fish whose leap had raised the spray. It must have been of some size to be heard over the land breeze.
    “So Cleveland’s back,” Sand said, gravel entering his tone. “He’s joined a cult and says he’s reformed. He apologized to me like a man, I’ll give him that. But he says he’s found a treasure on a planet called Corcyra, and he wants Bernis to fund an expedition to dig it up. There’s fighting going on, and he wants the treasure to buy arms for his cult, the Transformationists, so they don’t get squeezed by one side or the other.”
    “Corcyra?” Daniel repeated, frowning. “There’s fighting there, all right. I can tell you that Admiral Bocale is putting together a squadron right now, just in case the RCN gets involved.”
    Daniel had been offered command of a cruiser in Bocale’s squadron, but he’d decided to remain on half pay a little longer instead. If real war resumed between Cinnabar and the Alliance, Captain Daniel Leary could hope for something more interesting than a cruiser under Bocale. The admiral was known to be so concerned about making the wrong decision that he never made a really right one.
    “I guess Bernis knows that, too,” Sand said morosely. “She couldn’t fund it herself since she paid off the people Ordos