“Hmmm. Could you say anything about its size?” Von Krebs asked.
Some sensor in Stepanek alerted, and she opened her eyes and rose. She blinked at the wake.
“As big as a rowboat, maybe,” Duvalier said.
“Was there a fin?” Stepanek asked. “Did it blow water into the air?”
“No, I don’t think so. I didn’t hear a noise, but it was some ways off. Something broke water, but it wasn’t a fin.”
Von Krebs scanned the water. “It could have been a whale. There are many whales in the Baltic year-round.”
“Was it just one creature, or several close together?” Stepanek asked.
“It could have been several, I suppose. It didn’t rise out of the water by more than a foot.”
“Big—,” Stepanek started to say.
“Foot? Oh, yes, a foot,” Von Krebs said. “Twelve inches. I forget you Americans still use old English measures. Well, keep watching. Whales will sometimes come up and say ‘hello.’ Porpoises, too, for we will drive fish and create a bow wave they can ride.”
She watched the water for fifteen more minutes, trying to look out on both sides as well as to the rear, but then gave up. Perhaps the whale, if it was a whale, had been travelling in a southerly direction while they headed northeast. Still, she doubted it was a whale; didn’t they expel a lot of water with the air in their lungs? She didn’t know much about it beyond “thar she blows” from childhood reading.
Stepanek didn’t settle back down into her napping chair, either; instead she swept the stern regularly with her gaze. Maybe it was just paranoia on her part. She just wasn’t used to travelling this far this easily.
CHAPTER SIX
Kokkola on the Gulf of Bothnia, Finland: The city of Kokkola is an ancient gateway between Sweden and Finland, roughly halfway up the serrated Finnish coast on the Gulf of Bothnia. The “old” town is old indeed, dating to the fifteenth century, with tidy little homes representing traditional Finnish wooden architecture.
In 2022 it was considered a small Scandinavian hub in a good location for meetings and conferences. Hotels and meeting space, built in the clean-lined, open style of the region, filled every summer with organizations looking to take advantage of the glorious far-north summer weather and long, idyllic nights—in July the sun rises around three thirty in the morning and doesn’t set until eleven thirty or so in the evening.
Since the arrival of the Kurians, the population that was once roughly fifty thousand Finns has swelled to roughly one hundred fifty thousand people, in the form of émigrés from all over the Baltic. They brought with them their determination not to end up under the heel of the Kurians. Finland, now militarized to a greater extent than at any time since the “Winter War” when the Soviet Union invaded on the eve of the Second World War, maintains a small naval base, an army garrison, and a two-plane and two-helicopter military airfield for keeping an eye on the coastline. The forces assembled there are neither so great that it is considered an important military center in the great strategy rooms of Europe nor so small that independent headhunters or Kurian warships dare raid that section of the coast.
Ease of access by sea or air, conference space, and a few local amenities made the Baltic League select Kokkola as the location for the Ninth All-Freehold Conference. Seven hundred delegates (and their translators) from fifty-one freeholds or remote, unorganized territories made the trip, not even knowing their final destination until they arrived at the jump-off point designated by the Baltic League for the last leg of their voyages. The largest and most far-reaching shortwave news network set up a special broadcast center, though to hide the location of the conference a little longer, the broadcast aerial went across and by undersea cable to Sweden before being tra
nsmitted out to the world from an old military base north of Stockholm. All their broadcasts had a thirty-second delay, allowing censors to squelch any inadvertent information that might reveal the location of the conference.
The conference was expected to last two weeks. As events turned out, it became a near–record breaker, running to the very last day of that fateful July. The conferences usually made history in the form of long-range planning for picking off weaker Kurian Zones and helping to better establish new freeholds. No one, least of all the delegates from Southern Command and Kentucky, could have guessed just how much history would be made at this meeting.
The light hardly ever stopped this far north. It went full dark only as the clock approached midnight, and dawn came again before three. Even with all that sunlight, the summer heat never felt oppressive; there was a golden quality to the shine rather than the midsummer hot hammer she had grown used to beating down on her neck. Duvalier felt like a plant; the sun of the northern latitudes seemed to energize her.
They passed a pretty little island with a lighthouse set above some abandoned-looking buildings, and as that receded into the summery morning mists they entered Kokkola waters, guided by freshly painted buoys.
“Someone has been at work here for your meetings,” Stepanek said. “The last time I was here, two rusty old buoys were all I had to go on. Good thing it is not a difficult harbor in these days.”
“In these days,” Duvalier had learned, was a common expression among Balts, or whatever you called the mélange of Scandinavians, Finns, Russians, Germans, and so on who used these waters.
Duvalier was enough of a deepwater sailor by now to sense the change in the air and current as they glided into the glassy Bothnian Bay waters under a brilliant blue sky.
“The waters are like the Caribbean,” Valentine said, as he stood at the rail with her. Stepanek was busy navigating the Windkraft into the harbor, using a little motor that she learned existed on their second day out. Valentine had neither sought nor avoided Stepanek’s company, though she’d heard them after a meal on the middle night of the passage discussing her art acquisitions. He did relish a chance to have a conversation unconnected with the Kurian Order.
They passed a single ship on patrol, a tough-looking armed tug with a cannon up front and some kind of antiaircraft set of machine guns to the rear. It even had a spinning radar antenna.
“Monitor,” Von Krebs called to Stepanek as they approached. “Use the confirmation signal.”
Stepanek signaled them with a small searchlight, clacking out some sort of code. The tugboat flashed a brief acknowledgment.
After that, Von Krebs helped out with the rigging forward, following Stepanek’s commands. They made one more turn and found enough wind to bring them the rest of the way into the harbor under sail.
“Did you ever see that creature in our wake again?” Valentine asked.