Lt Leary 10 - The Sea Without a Shore by Drake David

Author:Drake, David [Drake, David]
Language: eng
Format: azw3
Tags: Science Fiction
Goodreads: 18143936
Publisher: Baen
Published: 2014-05-06T04:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 16

Platt’s Compound on Dace

The six sub-machine guns fired more or less together, though the first burst came before Hogg shouted, “Fire!” and the two last followed him shouting, “Cease fire!” There might have been yet another burst at the end if Hale hadn’t grabbed Furstein by the right wrist and twisted his hand and weapon skyward.

Daniel was philosophical about the shooting. He hadn’t been under any illusions about how his spacers measured up as marksmen. That was one of the reasons he’d set the crew to weapons practice here on the shore of the island.

“I’ve got them aiming at holographic projections right now, Master Platt,” Daniel said to the soft-looking bald man facing him beside the wall of Barracks #1. The shooters were a hundred yards away, so the gunfire was only an unpleasant crackling against the strong breeze. “Not a one of ’em would have a problem if I told them to blast you to cats’ meat instead. So tell me about the Corcyran envoys again, only this time make it the truth.”

Platt closed his eyes, but he couldn’t keep tears from leaking out under them. “Don’t,” he blubbered. “Don’t don’t don’t.…”

“Bloody hell, Evans!” Hale said. “You’ve got to take out the empty magazine before you can put in a fresh tube!”

Hogg and Hale were doing the training, but Daniel suspected that Hale was learning as much as the spacers under her charge. Her experience on a marksmanship team at the Academy would have given her a very false impression of what “shooting” meant to the average spacer. She had to understand the reality before she found herself commanding spacers in a firefight.

“Just tell me how the envoys were captured,” Daniel said soothingly. “Or arrested, if you want put it that way. You’re not in any trouble if you just tell me the truth.”

He’d figured the gunfire would make Platt uneasy, but he hadn’t expected the fellow to be such an abject coward that the implied threat made him incoherent. Daniel tried to hide his disgust when he realized that Platt had soiled himself in fear. Well, they wouldn’t be staying on Dace for long.

Platt’s Compound was one of eight settlements on the planet, all more or less the same. Dace was a low-lying world. Shallow seas covered ninety percent of the surface, and when a storm really got going, it could circle the planet several times before subsiding.

Large scale colonization and normal agriculture were impossible, but it was a good place to take on reaction mass and it provided seafood protein in simple factories which sucked in water and compressed the creatures which they filtered out. There was nothing in the seas more complex than a rotifer.

Platt’s had two barracks, a processing plant, and a residence which was only half the size of normal barracks. All the buildings were formed from slabs of edge-welded structural plastic. In good condition they were watertight. They would have floated off in storms if they hadn’t been anchored deep into the rock.

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