Ryswyck Read online

  “I suppose if you’re going to face Lieutenant Stevens you’d better be resilient,” Frasera said dryly.

  “Quite.” Barklay allowed himself a brief grin. “We are about to pass the administrative wing. This is where my offices and quarters are, as well as the briefing rooms which are used whenever post commanders hold council here. The data centers are down that corridor, and updates are coordinated through the tower several times a day—ah, Lieutenant Douglas,” Barklay said, speaking to a dark-haired junior officer who had just emerged from an office. “I was just speaking of communications. When you’ve finished with the meeting and had your supper, will you take a dispatch to General Inslee?”

  “Yes, sir,” Douglas said. “Shall I wait for his answer, or should I get an open line to your com-deck?”

  “Wait for his answer and bring it back to me,” Barklay said. “Thank you, Douglas.”

  Douglas saluted him, nodded respectfully to the lords, and moved quietly past them.

  “Douglas,” Barklay mentioned, “once threw Stevens with the baton, and almost won the match. He’s one of my best officers. If we take this left, we’ll arrive at the mess hall. If you are so inclined, I could give you supper before you go. And in fact, it is very little trouble to arrange for you to stay in the guest house for the night; allow me to offer it to you.” The offer was sincere, but he would be just as happy if they refused it.

  Thornhill and Frasera glanced at one another. “I think we’ll keep to our original plan,” Frasera said, “but I wouldn’t mind getting a bite to eat.”

  “Then let us go in to supper,” Barklay said.

  He ushered them forward with a gracious gesture, and they continued on, their well-heeled footsteps echoing down the stone-girt hall.

  ~*~

  “And I need one more person to fill the crew that’s cleaning out the stables at the end of this week,” said Lieutenant Cameron.

  “I’ll do it.”

  “Thank you, Stevens, that is much appreciated.” Cameron made a small mark with her stylus on the tablet. “There, that covers the unattached duties. Now, for the rotations—I got the word yesterday, we have officially got permission to form another duty rota, and Stevens has come on as a new captain.” There was a murmur of pleased comment. “It means more work for individuals, of course, but it should make scheduling easier. Ellis is projecting up the proposed schedule.” Ellis obligingly fiddled with the controls, and the projection popped up. People began shuffling, preparing to write down their own schedule. Douglas, who was captain of A Rota and had already seen the proposed schedule, remained still, feet braced comfortably flat with his scrip tucked behind on the floor.

  “Now, I’ve spoken with all the rota captains and they have checked on people’s personal duty schedules, so there should be a minimum of problems.” Cameron gave a resigned little sigh; a minimum of problems didn’t necessarily translate to a minimum of questions and requests for changes, Douglas knew. “Please consult with me after the meeting if there is something you absolutely have to have changed. Now—”

  “Cameron,” said Ahrens, “you’ve got me on both A Rota and E Rota. Are you trying to keep me out of trouble?”

  It was true. The room broke into snickers, and Cameron smiled ruefully. “My fault, Ahrens,” she said, briefly touching her closed hand to her breast. “Thank you for catching that.”

  “I think the other rota captains should bear some of that fault,” Douglas said dryly. “I didn’t catch it either.” The other rota captains murmured agreement.

  “All’s well,” Ahrens said. “But may I just have one set of duties?”

  “Yes,” Cameron said. “Pick which.”

  “E Rota is better for me.”

  “E Rota it is. By the way, this is the master schedule, not this week’s schedule. So E Rota, you’re on communications this week, not training, A Rota is on classroom, B is on training, C is on kitchen, D is on—what was it?—supply and waste. Speir, can I put you on A Rota’s roster?”

  “Certainly,” Speir said.

  “Excellent. Douglas will get you your pass-keys for the week. Douglas, you’re presiding over next week’s meeting….”

  “Yes…,” Douglas said.

  “And you promised you would straighten up the minute reports for us.”

  “So I did,” he sighed. “Yes. Give me the minute-book and I’ll get to work on it before the next meeting.”

  “Ellis, the minute-book goes to Douglas after the meeting. Thank you, and thank you, Douglas. Now—”

  Cameron always ran a meeting like a shepherd working a skittish flock through a gate, marshalling all her sheepdogs to push them through before they decided to break. Douglas amused himself contentedly with a picture of Cameron in a heavy hooded smock and thigh-boots just like his oldest sister’s, gnawing on a pipe and glaring at the sheep as they passed through.

  The meeting concluded with a plan for the month’s recreation activities and an enthusiastic scrutiny of the match schedule. It broke up in a flurry of exchanges between the rota captains and their teams, and the junior officers spilled out of the room to hurry and get supper before the mess hall closed. Douglas wasn’t very hungry, but he knew he wouldn’t have time for a snack later, so he went down and asked the cadet at the line for just a cup of stew and a barley roll, and took it to a corner to eat quickly.

  The mess hall had been quiet after the earlier passage of most of the cadets, but the junior officers livened it up a bit. A few benches away he saw Speir looking palely down at her plate of stew as if she’d rather fight it than eat it; Stevens plopped himself down across from her, followed quickly by several others who were clearly interested in the topic of the afternoon’s match. If Douglas hadn’t had his other duties, he would have stirred himself to join them. He scraped up the last few bites of stew, and took his tray to the hatch.

  Barklay wasn’t in his office, but in the outer office a sealed packet with Douglas’s name on it lay on the front desk. He opened it: a tablet and a brief note of instruction from Barklay’s hand. Good.

  As he was opening the door to the long quad between the school building and the tower, Stevens fell in with him.

  “Going up the tower, are you? I’ll come with you, if you don’t mind.”

  “I’m running an errand for Barklay,” Douglas said, hesitating. But enlightenment broke a second later and he shot Stevens a half-smile. “I see. It’s Ansley on duty tonight, isn’t it. I didn’t know you were still cultivating her.”

  “They say patience is a virtue,” Stevens said. “I’ll probably sleep alone tonight, but it’s worth trying.”

  “I admire your persistent keenness,” Douglas said, chuckling. They went out into the long quad between the school building and the tower. Stevens put his hood up against the rain; Douglas, who was from the North, didn’t bother.

  “Why don’t you ask Speir?” Douglas said. “I bet she’d be interested.”

  “I did,” Stevens said. “She just smiled and said no thank you. I gather from the context that she’s too single-minded to give much time to extracurricular stuff. Bit like you, may be.”

  Douglas snorted at that last. “Hard luck for you,” he said.

  “Don’t I know it. I bet it would have been fun. She put me on my ass twice.”

  “I saw that, my comrade. Very impressive.”

  “It was a good match. Any more cadets like her coming up in your section? I hold out some hope of getting beat before I leave.”

  It was impossible to pass up a straight line like that. “Just like you hold out some hope of getting laid before you leave?”

  Stevens shoved him playfully, and they both laughed.

  The evening gloom darkened the air as they reached the tower and engaged its open lift to carry them to the top. At the summit, Douglas gave Lieutenant Ansley his codes, docked the tablet to transfer its digests to Inslee’s line once it was open, and then wandered to the windows to wait and allow Stevens his opportunity.

&
nbsp; The tower was older than the school: it was hard to say exactly how old it was, but it was possible it dated back to the bad times, seven generations past, or even before the nuclear holocaust that had broken the world then; yet it probably wasn’t as old as the cloister foundations on the far side of the school complex, toward the south coast. Its current function was to gather and encode com signals, but in older incarnations it had probably controlled the airfield, which was much smaller now, a green expanse as flat as the quads of the school itself, terraced against the rain.

  There was one shuttle parked on the airfield; in the dim evening light Douglas could make out three figures standing near it—the two Council lords, and Barklay. The shuttle was big enough to carry them not just to the tram depot but all the way back to the capital: a true flying visit, then. As Douglas watched, the two got into the shuttle, and Barklay headed back toward the school alone: his pace was steady, but Douglas’s eye detected a plod in his usually-vigorous stride. Barklay sponsored his school as wholeheartedly as he might have sponsored his own child, and he’d been doing it for twenty years, ever since he’d come back from his tour of duty on the other side of the strait. Even now he rarely showed weariness, unless you knew what to look for.

  This was the third such impromptu visit in a month. Douglas thought this worrisome, though Barklay had discussed the import of these visits with nobody, passing them off as mere politics and nothing else. Perhaps there was a change coming in the cold stasis of the war; perhaps there was a shake-up brewing in the higher echelons of the military; perhaps Ryswyck’s reputation as a tight-knit enclave with odd customs had unnerved somebody in the Council enough to poke around looking for trouble. It was hard to tell.

  Barklay had named his school after the little hamlet in which he’d been born, a fact which every Ryswyckian seemed to learn by osmosis, because Barklay never talked about his home, as if for fear he’d summon its fate to haunt them. Reyswick village was a crater now, and Barklay its only living scion, and though Douglas’s generation had never known Ilona at peace, he did not misunderstand the forlorn defiance of that symbolism. He reminded himself of it sometimes, when he was feeling tired and exasperated.

  Up here in the tower, with Ryswyck Academy below him and the coastal hills all around, Douglas caught his mental breath and regained his grasp of the wider world. Below, Barklay had become a shadowy figure moving in the twilight darkness, growing sharper when he reached the light spilling from the ground-floor windows.

  Douglas turned to see Stevens getting into the lift. He tipped Douglas a wink as he passed; it was an equal probability whether that meant he’d secured an assignation, or crashed and burned.

  The reply was ready. Douglas checked it, locked the tablet with his code, and thanked Ansley properly before calling up the lift himself.

  As he’d expected, Barklay had gone straight back to his office: he was at his desk when Douglas knocked on the doorframe.

  “Ah, Douglas, good. I’ve just finished seeing off our guests.”

  “Yes, sir.” After a hesitation Douglas nerved himself to ask: “Sir, is there trouble brewing?”

  Barklay blinked and looked up. “Why—oh, because of the Council visitors. No, there’s no trouble. Well, no more than usual,” he corrected himself dryly. “Oh, don’t look at me like that. As far as I know all is well.”

  “Yes, sir,” Douglas said, burying his skepticism.

  Barklay wasn’t fooled, but instead of pursuing it he settled for giving Douglas his dry smile. “Is that Inslee’s reply you’ve got there?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Well, I’ll take it now, then. Bring it in.” He closed the folder he was perusing and moved it to the top of a pile at his side. “And shut the door, will you, Douglas?”

  “Yes, sir,” Douglas said.

  ~*~

  “And get this off to General Barklay down at Ryswyck; his com tower’s waiting for my reply. Security code four. And that will be all, Staff-Captain Amis. Get yourself to bed after this.”

  “Yes, sir,” Amis said, already on his way out.

  The sun was down: Inslee could see his own tired face reflected in the windows of his office, and within that reflection the shadow of the weather tower of Cardumel Base.

  Amis leaned back in. “Sir, you have an open-line request from Colonel Marshall. Shall I—”

  “No, I’ll talk to him,” Inslee said wearily. “Bounce him over.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  Inslee drew up his com-deck and tapped the acceptance code.

  “Good evening, General.” Colonel Marshall saluted him with a quick flash of his outward palm.

  Inslee returned the salute. “Colonel Marshall. What can I do for you?”

  “It’s more what I can do for you,” Marshall said cheerfully. He looked disgustingly hale and rested. “You fellows recovered from winter yet?”

  “Very nearly,” Inslee said, dry to the point of sarcasm. “By the time we’ve set everything to rights, it’ll be near icefall again.”

  “Be glad we’re not on the western side of the Ridge. At least here we can burn through the glaze. Eventually.”

  This was true enough, but Inslee found it hard to be grateful.

  Marshall went on. “Your supply requisition has come early, to speak of miracles, and I’d like to send it along. Only Colmhaven flotilla can’t spare ships for the convoy till next week. Have you got any of the Boundary resting at Colm’s Island? You could send ‘em across and get your supplies faster. Give ‘em something to do, too.”

  “Hm,” Inslee said. “Let me communicate with Admiral Eysgarth and see what I can scare up. I’ll send you a message in the morning with what I find out.”

  The list of things Inslee had to do always grew a long tail just before he was scheduled to sleep, but this was a welcome task. Perhaps there’d be some fresher food provisions in the convoy. Inslee thanked Marshall sincerely and closed the line.

  Inslee had been at this post for ten years, years in which not Berenians but supply requisition forms invaded his dreams; a far cry from the visions of glory he’d entertained in his youth, of sweeping over the strait to crush the threat of attack once and for all. He’d served in the expeditionary forces with distinction, and his gifts for discipline and tactical organization had won him promotion out of the field, even as the field widened across the water. Ilona had lost all that ground since, of course, and fallen back behind the naval lines that guarded the island’s coast.

  And that was the way things had stayed for twenty years, barring a few abortive attempts on Berenia’s part at invasion, and occasional Ilonian raids on their shipping. Since Inslee had come to Cardumel, Berenia had pulled back into a menacing quiet under the leadership of its new Lord Executive, Emmerich du Rau, and the war had gone cold. Ilona didn’t have the personnel to launch another invasion; and nobody on either side had the money. Instead of glorious charges, Inslee had devoted his career to careful and quotidian vigilance. Colm’s Island was Ilona’s citadel of the north, and Inslee made it his business to know everything that happened on and around it.

  Inslee got a secure audio line to Admiral Eysgarth, who confirmed that he did indeed have ships to spare for a convoy of supplies; it helped, Inslee thought wryly, that a resupply of Cardumel benefited him also. That was another of the virtues for which he’d won this post: a knack for intra-service diplomacy.

  He spent another half an hour clearing off his desk, and was just about to head toward the sleep of the just when the com tower buzzed him with an open-line request from General Barklay. Inslee damned intra-service diplomacy and accepted the call.

  “General Inslee,” Barklay greeted him, with a smart salute. His collar and insignia were as crisp as ever, but there were dark creases under his eyes. Good, somebody was as tired as Inslee this evening.

  “General Barklay,” Inslee greeted him in return. “I wasn’t expecting a conference so soon after my return message.”

  “No?” Barklay said. �
��But you didn’t—ah. I see; I am keeping you from your rest. Forgive me. Now, about those officers—”

  “Yes,” Inslee sighed. “Of my officers, I’m afraid only Amis would do for your purposes, and I can’t spare him.” Holding his irritation in check, he added, “The request really ought to go the other way—I need officers from you more than you from me. The morale here could stand some improvement.”

  “Hm. I haven’t got any junior officers who are quite ready for promotion, though I’ll certainly keep my eye on that for you. How many of mine have you got there now?”

  “Lieutenant Barr and Lieutenant Angus. They’re shaping well. And I’ve a few of the rank-and-file who passed through your service course last year; they are all pretty reliable, though not yet officer material.”

  “Yes,” Barklay said, thoughtfully. “And there was that unfortunate debacle a few years ago with Lieutenant Kerra….”

  Well, since Barklay mentioned it himself… “Yes,” Inslee said with another sigh. “If only he hadn’t decided that the solution to the distribution problem was to divert resources and alter the documents after. Well, he took his court-martial with characteristic grace. You certainly teach your men and women pretty manners.”

  He saw the flash of defensive anger in Barklay’s eyes, but sensed that it would only make matters worse to walk his last sentence back. But Barklay only said simply, “The court-martial wasn’t cosmetic. If I did my job, his manners weren’t either.”

  “Quite,” Inslee said, and let that stand for his apology. To his relief, Barklay’s feathers went down.

  “Well,” he said, “I shall have to cast my net a little wider for good teaching officers, it seems. I’ll keep your needs in mind as well.”

  “Please do,” Inslee said.

  They exchanged salutes, and Inslee closed the line, getting up as he did so. At the door he shut down the lights. His office was high enough to see above the light-shields of the weather tower: through the windows Inslee could see the officer inside going about his duties. It was a rare clear night on Colm's Island; soon the rain would move in again and resume the long process of washing the winter's ice away. For the moment, at least, all was well.