The Savior Read online

  Table of Contents

  MAPS

  PART ONE: The Thrust1

  2

  3

  PART TWO: The Penance1

  2

  3

  4

  5

  PART THREE: The Load1

  2

  3

  PART FOUR: The Toll1

  2

  3

  4

  5

  PART FIVE: The Command1

  2

  PART SIX: The Clash1

  2

  3

  4

  5

  6

  7

  PART SEVEN: The Tinder1

  2

  PART EIGHT: The Campaign1

  2

  3

  4

  PART NINE: The Lost1

  2

  3

  4

  PART TEN: The Consort1

  2

  3

  PART ELEVEN: The Fuse1

  2

  3

  PART TWELVE: The Return1

  PART THIRTEEN: The War1

  2

  3

  4

  5

  6

  7

  8

  9

  PART FOURTEEN: The Sacrifice1

  2

  3

  PART FIFTEEN: The Climb1

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  The Savior

  Tony Daniel & David Drake

  FROM HERETIC TO SAVIOR

  Duisberg is one of thousands of planets plunged into darkness and chaos by the collapse of the galactic republic, but where other worlds have begun to rebuild a star-travelling culture, Duisberg remains in an uneasy balance between mud-brick civilization and bloodthirsty barbarism.

  The people of Duisberg have a god: Zentrum, a supercomputer from the ancient past. Zentrum has decided avoid another collapse by preventing civilization from rising from where it is. This is known as the Stasis. And because even a supercomputer and the powerful religion which it founded cannot block all progress, Zentrum has another tool: every few centuries the barbarians sweep in from the desert, slaughtering the educated classes and cowing the peasants back into submission. These are the Blood Winds, and the Blood Winds are about to blow again.

  This time, however, there's a difference: Abel Dashian, son of a military officer, has received into his mind the spirit of Raj Whitehall, the most successful general in the history of the planet Bellevue—and of Center, the supercomputer which enabled Raj to shatter his planet's barbarians and permit the return of civilization.

  One hero can't stop the tide of barbarians unless he has his own culture supporting him. To save Duisberg, Abel must conquer the very land of his origin and attempt to destroy the computer A.I. “god” who has doomed his world to an everlasting Dark Age. Abel is a heretic, but now he must go beyond and become—THE SAVIOR.

  THE GENERAL SERIES

  by David Drake

  The Forge with S.M. Stirling

  The Hammer with S.M. Stirling

  The Anvil with S.M. Stirling

  The Steel with S.M. Stirling

  The Sword with S.M. Stirling

  The Chosen with S.M. Stirling

  The Reformer with S.M. Stirling

  The Tyrant with Eric Flint

  The Heretic with Tony Daniel

  The Savior with Tony Daniel

  OMNIBUS EDITIONS

  Hope Reborn with S.M. Stirling

  Hope Rearmed with S.M. Stirling

  Hope Renewed with S.M. Stirling

  Hope Reformed with S.M. Stirling and Eric Flint

  The Savior

  This is a work of fiction. All the characters and events portrayed in this book are fictional, and any resemblance to real people or incidents is purely coincidental.

  Copyright © 2014 by Tony Daniel and David Drake

  All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book or portions thereof in any form.

  A Baen Books Original

  Baen Publishing Enterprises

  P.O. Box 1403

  Riverdale, NY 10471

  www.baen.com

  ISBN: 978-1-4767-3670-9

  Cover art by Kurt Miller

  First Baen printing, September 2014

  Distributed by Simon & Schuster

  1230 Avenue of the Americas

  New York, NY 10020

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Daniel, Tony.

  The savior / Tony Daniel & David Drake.

  pages cm

  ISBN 978-1-4767-3670-9 (hardback)

  1. Life on other planets—Fiction. I. Drake, David, 1945– II. Title.

  PS3554.A558S38 2014

  813’.54—dc23

  2014020259

  10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  Pages by Joy Freeman (www.pagesbyjoy.com)

  Printed in the United States of America

  eISBN: 978-1-62579-309-6

  Electronic Version by Baen Books

  www.baen.com

  For my father

  —T.D.

  MAPS

  Map also available at: www.baen.com/saviorhereticrivermap.jpg

  Map also available at: www.baen.com/saviorprogarmap.jpg

  Map also available at: www.baen.com/saviorlindronmap.jpg

  PART ONE

  The Thrust

  Eight years after the events of The Heretic

  1

  Ingres District

  476 Post Tercium

  Three moons hung in the night sky. Churchill, the largest moon, was a quarter-sickle to the east. Mommsen and Levot, much smaller, were chips of fire to the southwest. Both were full. It was, as usual in the Land, a cloudless night.

  A bonfire burned in a trampled area in the midst of a near-ripe barley field. Although it was dark, there was enough moonlight for Major Abel Dashian to see as he made his way through the barley and toward the fire to check in with one of the platoons of Friday Company.

  The tall barley, a few weeks from harvest, swished against his canvas-wrapped legs, until he got to the edge of the cleared spot where the platoon had camped for the night. When the Guardians of Zentrum were on the march, they used no tents. Each man had a thin sleeping roll laid out on a waxen tarp. Beside each sleeping man was his pack. Each weighed three stones and contained rations, gunpowder in two mountain-dak powderhorns, and wicker containers of percussion caps and papyrus-wrapped minié cartridges. Guardians left their personal effects at home. Abel didn’t have many to begin with. The only item that he had any deep attachment to, a lock of his dead mother’s hair, he kept in a box in his officer quarters back in the city of Lindron.

  The resting Guardians in the barley were spread out around their rifle tripods. Every squad had a wooden rack, and eight musket rifles stood neatly on butt-end in a circle around each rack, their barrels meeting in the crisscross of sticks above the lashing. Each man was only a few steps away from his weapon. There were four squads to the platoon, forming a rough circular pattern around the central cookfire. Two crosshatched paths for walking divided the sleeping men into quarters.

  Abel made his way along one of these paths toward the fire.

  Friday Company was on the eastern edge of the encampment. There were pickets out a bit farther, but this was the edge of the camp proper. Abel was walking the line, checking vulnerable positions. As executive officer of Third Brigade and aide-de-camp to the colonel that led it, this was his job each evening during the northward march.

  He’d been a commanding officer himself in the Regulars just nine months ago: district military commander of Cascade, with the rank of colonel. Then the call had come to assemble all Guardian reserves from the various districts, and he’d returned to
his old rank, major. The fact that he served under a man he respected, and for whom he even felt fondness, lessened the sting of relative demotion. Colonel Zachary von Hoff had been his favorite instructor at the Guardian Academy. For the past months, Abel had served as his adjutant and chief of command staff for the Guardian Third Brigade.

  It helped that a good many of the lower ranks in the Third were men who had risen through a special selection program Abel had created in Cascade. The chosen men were sent off to the Special Warfare School in Lindron, the noncommissioned version of the Guardian Academy. Abel had been surprised and gratified to find that von Hoff had been on the lookout for his Cascade men and had snatched them up for the Third the moment they finished their Guardian boot camp. There were, then, transplanted Cascade men throughout the Third, men he knew and who knew him.

  Although the platoon corpsmen—all men in their teens and early twenties—were bedded down, seven older soldiers remained around the fire. Abel recognized a staff sergeant he knew. He was with the other squad sergeants, and a couple of specialist master sharpshooters attached to the platoon. All of them wore the braided sash and twisted armband of carnadon leather that marked their rank.

  The noncoms spoke in low voices, and Abel presumed that they were discussing, as most men did with a day’s march behind them, company scuttlebutt, women, pay, the possibilities of loot during the upcoming campaign—and what the hell was going on in the Progar District that was so bad it had caused the Abbot of Lindron to send an army of sixteen thousand troops to deal with it.

  Correct. There is talk of the march, and there is also discussion of the relative merits of the various whorehouses of Bruneberg, said a thin, high-pitched voice in Abel’s mind.

  It was a familiar voice, a voice Abel had heard since he was six years old.

  A voice like nightscraper chirps, if they were made of words instead of squeaks, Abel thought. He’d heard more nightscrapers in the past few weeks than he had in years. It was good to be in the field.

  These sergeants speculate that there may be a pause near Bruneberg, perhaps an encampment of several days that would be long enough for them to travel into the city proper, conduct experiments in regard to the whorehouses, and compare notes.

  The chirping voice belonged to Center, a being who claimed to be an artificial intelligence descended on a traveling capsule from the sky. Center, whom Abel had decided to call “he” long ago, shared a portion of Abel’s mind with another ghostly presence: a man named General Raj Whitehall.

  The bastards should hope to march on past or the town will drain them of every barter chit they possess, said Raj in a voice so deep it was almost a growl. If all goes well, on the trip home they’ll have a rucksack full of spoils to spend on a proper leave.

  Raj was a rougher being than Center, foul-mouthed on occasion, and most definitely male. He claimed to have once been a conquering general on a planet called Bellevue several hundred years ago and multiple millions of leagues away. Now he was a voice in Abel’s mind, an artificial intelligence construct, the same as Center. As forceful as Raj’s presence was even now—at times threatening to overwhelm Abel’s own will—Abel could only wonder what it would have been like to meet the living general in person.

  Abel emerged silently from the barley, surprising the hell out of one of the sergeants who saw a fully armed form materialize from the darkness. Abel might be a commanding officer, but on night duty he carried a rifle himself, slung around onto his back, where it was held by a strap, its bayonet unfixed and strapped in its holder on the underside of the stock. He was also armed with his own dragon, a flare-muzzled blunderbuss pistol held under his belt strap. He carried it on the left side, handle reversed, for drawing. A sword in a scabbard of carnadon leather hung at his left side as well. The sword was a mark of rank, and was generally useless in battle. But it was Abel’s concession to tradition, a family heirloom, given to him by his father when Abel had made captain of scouts in the Regulars.

  It had not been entirely useless, either: Abel had killed men with the sword. And so had his ancestors.

  “Evening, Major Dashian,” said the startled staff sergeant, recovering himself and saluting.

  Abel returned it.

  “Evening, Staff Sergeant,” he replied. He knew the man. He came from the Guardian capital garrison and not from the reserve call-ups. What was his name?

  Silverstein.

  Abel took a knee by the fire. One of the other noncoms offered him a clay cup of steaming hard cider. Abel took it with a nod of thanks. The cider had a burnt taste and was very hot. He held the cup on his upright knee to let the cider cool, and glanced around the fire.

  Silverstein was a short man of River Delta stock. The staff sergeant’s jaw moved in a regular motion. He was chewing gum. Delta men substituted such gum for the tobaccolike nesh that Abel had grown up around in Treville District. He did not dip or chew himself, but he did smoke a pipe of nesh weed occasionally.

  Abel remembered Silverstein because not many of the enlisted from the Delta ever made corporal, much less moved up to a higher rank. He’d inquired and found that Silverstein had made his mark by fighting in a bloody engagement against the Flanagans, the wild tribe of barbarians who inhabited the coast to the east of where the River spilled into the Braun Sea.

  “So, Staff Sergeant, how did we do on the march today?” asked Abel. “Do you think we can get another eight leagues out of them tomorrow?”

  Silverstein looked up at Abel with a faint smile on his face. “I think they’ll do all right, Major,” he said. “We have some tired feet and broken sandals, but it’s nothing that a good night’s rest and a bit of stitching in the morning won’t fix.”

  “Glad to hear it, Sergeant,” Abel replied. “Because I think we’re going to try for ten tomorrow.”

  This caused a low groan from the others gathered around the fire, but Silverstein nodded. “We’ll soon be in Treville District, where the roads are broad and tended, not to mention much safer, what with your father in charge of the Black and Tans there, sir.”

  “Yes, should be no need for these whole company pickets in Treville.”

  Which meant that there was a need for such large units standing watch here in Ingres, the less populated district that lay between the districts of Lindron and Treville. Redlander barbarians who wouldn’t set foot in Treville, at least in the past eight years after their total defeat at the Battle of the Canal, had shifted their raiding to Ingres.

  “Of course, anybody who’d take on an army of Goldies would have to be crazy in any district,” another of the sergeants put in. Goldies was the familiar term for the Guardian Corps, whose colors were gold and tan.

  “Or desperate,” Abel said. He took another sip of the cider and discovered that it had cooled enough to drink. He tipped the cup back and drained it. It was a bit burnt from sitting over the fire too long, but had a familiar and welcome taste from his days as a Treville Scout.

  One of the other sergeants looked up and held a dipper full of cider from the pot that was boiling over the fire. “Refill, Major?” he asked.

  Swiiiish.

  A movement that was not wind through the barley. It came from somewhere off to the side of them.

  Silverstein grunted in pain, and dropped the ladle, the cider hissing as it hit the fire.

  A crossbow bolt protruded from his neck.

  Crackle of barley. Someone out there in the darkness. More than one.

  Multiple hostiles at thirty paces north-northeast, reported Center.

  Get down, lad! Raj shouted in Abel’s mind.

  The instincts of his dozen years as a Scout kicked in, and Abel dove for the ground. He immediately went into a roll to pull his musket around to the front, and ended the movement lying prone, his face staring into the darkness beyond the fire ring. He could see nothing, nothing at all.

  Dust take it, I’ve been staring into the thrice-damned fire and lost my night vision.

  Whiiiisk!

&n
bsp; He might not be able to see, but he knew that sound. Arrowflight.

  Whiiisk! Whiiisk!

  The unmistakable thunk of more arrows hitting human flesh.

  No, not normal arrows. Too high-pitched.

  You were correct before in your assessment, said Center. They are crossbow bolts.

  Cries of pain from two other men at the campfire. Abel glanced back over his shoulder, again compromising his night vision. Silverstein was down, grasping at his neck. One of the other sergeants rose up and pawed at his face for a moment, then his arms went limp and he pitched forward into the fire. The other hopped around clutching at his leg. It was too dark to see exactly what was going on, but Abel figured there was a bolt lodged there in his thigh.

  With a cry of anger, Silverstein yanked the bolt from his neck.

  “Bloody hell!” he cried, and ran for the nearest stack of rifles. Before he could get there, three more bolts caught him in the chest and legs. Silverstein collapsed in front of the musket stand, his legs twitching.