Into the Maelstrom Read online

  Table of Contents

  CHAPTER 1

  CHAPTER 2

  CHAPTER 3

  CHAPTER 4

  CHAPTER 5

  CHAPTER 6

  CHAPTER 7

  CHAPTER 8

  CHAPTER 9

  CHAPTER 10

  CHAPTER 11

  CHAPTER 12

  CHAPTER 13

  CHAPTER 14

  CHAPTER 15

  CHAPTER 16

  CHAPTER 17

  CHAPTER 18

  CHAPTER 19

  CHAPTER 20

  CHAPTER 21

  CHAPTER 22

  CHAPTER 23

  CHAPTER 24

  CHAPTER 25

  CHAPTER 26

  CHAPTER 27

  CHAPTER 28

  CHAPTER 29

  CHAPTER 30

  CHAPTER 31

  THE RIGHT MAN FOR A VERY BAD JOB

  The Cutter Stream colonies were at peace. If everybody behaved reasonably, that peace could last a thousand years.

  Allen Allenson had known war; it had made him peaceful and reasonable. He was far too experienced to believe the same was true of all his fellow colonists, however, let alone the government of the distant homeworld across the Bight.

  War was coming, a war that the colonies had to win if they were ever to be more than prison camps and a dumping ground for incompetent noblemen. The experience that had caused Allenson to hate war made him the only man who could lead the colonial army.

  Allenson knew that he wasn't really a general, but he understood his fellow colonists better than any homeworld general could. He would free the Cutter Stream, or he would die trying.

  What Allen Allenson would not do, what he would never do, was quit.

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  Into the Maelstrom with John Lambshead

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  Into the Maelstrom with David Drake

  INTO THE MAELSTROM

  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 © 2015 by David Drake and John Lambshead

  A Baen Book

  Baen Publishing Enterprises

  P.O. Box 1403

  Riverdale, NY 10471

  www.baen.com

  ISBN: 978-1-4767-8028-3

  Cover art by David Seeley

  First Baen printing, March 2015

  Distributed by Simon & Schuster

  1230 Avenue of the Americas

  New York, NY 10020

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Drake, David, 1945-

  Into the maelstrom / David Drake & John Lambshead.

  pages cm. -- (Citizen ; 2)

  Summary: "The Cutter Stream colonies were at peace. If everyone behaved

  reasonably, that peace could last a thousand years. Allen Allenson had

  known war; it had made him peaceful and reasonable. He was far too

  experienced to believe the same of all his fellow colonists, let alone

  the government of the distant homeworld. War was coming, a war the

  colonies had to win if they were ever to be more than prison camps and a

  dumping ground for incompetent noblemen. Allenson knew that he wasn't

  really a general, but he understood his fellow colonists better than any

  homeworld general could. He would free the Cutter Stream or die trying"--

  Provided by publisher.

  ISBN 978-1-4767-8028-3 (hardback)

  1. Science fiction. I. Lambshead, John. II. Title.

  PS3554.R196I74 2015

  813'.54--dc23

  2014043651

  Printed in the United States of America

  10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  “To the legion of the lost ones, to the cohort of the damned,”

  “Gentlemen-Rankers,” Barrack Room Ballads

  by Rudyard Kipling

  This book is dedicated to all the soldiers

  throughout history who fought and died in unremembered wars

  for causes long abandoned.

  CHAPTER 1

  Magnetar

  Tap—Tap—Tap went the claw on the window.

  Commander Frisco pressed her eyelids together tighter than a virgin’s knees in the hope that the damn thing would go away.

  Tap—Tap—Tap.

  It didn’t—go away that is.

  She opened her eyes slowly and very reluctantly. The goblin leered at her from the other side of the airtight screen from where it perched on the blunt shovel-nose of her ship. Triangular was a word that summed it up, triangular and blue. Its head was a downwards pointing triangle ending in a long pointed chin. Its mouth V-shaped with triangular teeth, its chest V-shaped, even its bloody ears were triangular.

  Stroppy was another good descriptive word. The creature thrust vigorously upwards with two fingers topped with triangular claws. It made the time-honored Brasilian gesture indicating that she should indulge in sex and travel. She tried not to notice what it was doing with its other hand.

  Most of the time the Continuum looked like a seething mass of multicolored energy but every so often ship crews saw and heard illusions. The philosophical postulated that such phantasms were the product of some sort of arcane interaction between the human mind and energy leakage through the ship’s field. In truth, no one had a clue why the phenomenon occurred but the illusions were usually specific to each individual.

  Such ghosts materialized when one was under stress, causing fears to be dredged from deep within the mind. Helena Frisco was hard pressed to explain why her subconscious might harbor blue goblins with triangular body parts and obscene habits. It was probably Finkletop’s fault; most current problems in Helena’s universe originated with feckin’ Finkletop.

  Satisfaction with her promotion to commander and the captaincy of the Brasilian Research and Exploration Ship Reggie Kray, nicknamed the Twin-Arsed Bastard
by the other ranks, rapidly eroded when she shared her first cruise with Professor Obadiah Finkletop. The good professor held a Personal Chair in Cosmic Evolution at Blue Horizon College. No doubt his peers considered him a learned savant. Helena considered him a pain in the arse.

  Finkletop alone she might have coped with but the old fool was completely under the spell of his research student, a curvaceous young lady who went by the name of “Flipper” Wallace. What Flipper wanted, Flipper got and her desires were entirely capricious when looked at from a naval perspective.

  The catamaran hulled Reggie Kray, hence its nickname, had all the naval equipment including the engines and field generators in the “A” hull so that various “B” hulls stuffed with different scientific equipment could be added or detached as required by the current mission objective. The mission in this case was to convey Finkletop’s research group to a neutron star deep in the Hinterlands. The exercise involved gathering “stuff” to test some scientific hypothesis or other concerning nova chains. Finkletop failed to volunteer details and Helena felt no desire to inquire.

  The Reggie Kray was about as large a ship as could usefully be navigated within the Hinterlands where the gravity shadows of star systems were tightly packed in the Continuum. This stellar proximity channeled chasms, or streams, of boiling energy that made the passage of larger ships too slow and laborious to be viable. Speed equaled range in the Continuum because passage time was capped.

  The Reggie Kray handled like a pig because of the asymmetric design. On the plus side Helena did not have so socialize too much with the bloody academics. They tended to keep to their own territory in the “B” hull.

  A symbol flashed in the area by her command chair reserved for holographic controls. Finkletop desired communication. She sighed and keyed the comm symbol, ignoring a mischievous impulse to activate the B hull emergency detachment bolts instead. The goblin gave a final leer and disappeared. Helena did not recall that the detachment icon was a blue triangle. No doubt that was just as well.

  “Ah, Frisco?” said Finkletop’s voice by her chair. She had switched out the video. It was bad enough having to listen to the man without looking at a caricature of personal grooming that would cause a Naval Academy drill instructor to self-immolate. She rearranged her features into a neutral expression because he could no doubt see her.

  “Professor, what a pleasant surprise to talk to you again and so soon after our last conversation.”

  “Flipper, Ms. Wallace, needs to be closer to the neutron star. You will move to point gamma-3-alpha-99.”

  The two ratings on the bridge with Helena froze. They developed a deep fascination with their consoles. It was not normally considered good naval practice to give orders to a ship’s captain on her own bridge. Not unless you were an admiral at any rate. Even then an order was usually couched as a suggestion. As research team leader Finkletop had the authority to choose the survey sites but the bloody man could show some deference to her rank.

  Helena gritted her teeth and keyed in the necessary course as she couldn’t think of a good reason to refuse. She automatically checked storage heat levels as she did so. Ships’ fusion engines supplied effectively unlimited fuel but electromagnetic radiation could not pass out through the Continuum field reality bubble to any extent. Waste heat had to be “stored” in heat sinks made of frozen iron cores. Captains worried constantly about heat build-up. When levels got too high there was nothing for it but to find a suitable world with available water to dump heat and refreeze the cores.

  Unfortunately the Reggie Kray still had an adequate reserve in the sinks. She hit the command key. Her staff would attend to the details of the course change.

  “And could you part phase so we can observe the system.”

  “Why not?” Helena asked, waving a hand to the appropriate minion to indicate that he should comply. “Anything else we can do for you? Brew up some tea and send it ’round to your hull, perhaps?”

  “We are too busy for a tea break. Some of us have work to do,” Finkletop replied, killing the link.

  The bloody man was impervious to sarcasm.

  The pilot slowly part-dephased the ship on approaching the neutron star. With its fields at low power the reality bubble enclosing the Reggie Kray was subject to a degree of interaction with electromagnetic energy from realspace. That meant that the crew saw into the real universe, albeit in monochrome. In return, light-speed limitations slowed the ship to a crawl. Not an issue in this case as they had only a short distance to travel.

  The neutron star was tiny despite its huge mass. It gave off only a dull glow in the visible spectrum. Helena had to look hard to find it against the background star-field but the body’s effects were out of all proportion to its size. It probably weighed about 1,000,000,000,000 kilograms per milliliter. That gave it a gravitational field so strong that escape velocity would be measured in significant fractions of light speed.

  A large chaotic debris field rotated at high speed around the star. Helena found it unnerving to watch the lumps of ice, metal and rock tracked on the navigational hologram. No doubt similar junk hurtled through the ship’s realspace location at speeds too high to be visible to the naked eye. She could create a holographic representation of the bombardment for the crew’s edification but doubted they would enjoy the experience.

  Deep space made sailors uneasy. Most voyages started and ended on the surface of habitable worlds, the ships phasing within the world’s air envelope. Fields enclosed air within the reality bubble so most commercial vessels and small frames omitted an air-tight hull as an unnecessary expense. The naval architects designed the Reggie Kray to sustain human life even with the fields off because of its unusual research function.

  Massive tidal effects commonly produced swirling fields of junk around a neutron star but this one was positively frenzied. Helena ran an analysis using the limited electromagnetic radiation that penetrated the ship’s field.

  The comm link lit up. Helena sighed and keyed it.

  “We may’ve found it,” Finkletop’s voice shook slightly with excitement.

  “Oh good,” Helena said, wondering what “it” was.

  “You must dephase completely and turn off the shields so we can obtain samples.”

  “Must I?”

  “Yes, it’s possible the frame field might interfere with the specimens.”

  Helena touched the “hold” icon while she recovered her calm.

  “Have you looked outside at all, Professor?” Helena eventually asked. “You may have noticed something of a debris storm.”

  “Never mind the paintwork on your ship. This research is too important to be held up by petty military regulations. I’d explain but you wouldn’t understand.”

  “It may have escaped your notice, Professor, but I captain this vessel. As such I am responsible for it and the crew. If I decide your request,” Helena emphasized the word if, “is too dangerous then it won’t happen.”

  “I shall complain to the Grant Committee!”

  “Indeed.”

  The opinion of an academic grant committee carried about as much weight with Helena as a petition from a delegation of rock apes. She answered to the Navy Board and she doubted they cared a fig what a bunch of academics thought either. On the other hand the Board could be downright unreasonable to captains who smashed up their ships.

  “It may also have escaped your notice, Professor, but that is not just a neutron star out there but a magnetar, a star with a massive magnetic field—”

  “I know what a magnetar is.”

  Helena continued remorselessly as if he hadn’t spoken.

  “—which is why the debris field is so energetic and chaotic. Iron debris is subject to different forces from nonmagnetic rocks and hence has different trajectories. The resulting collisions cause endless fragmentation. It would be like dephasing into a shotgun blast of hypersonic pellets.”

  Finkletop said. “Well, if you’re frightened—”

&n
bsp; “Be careful, Professor,” Helena’s knuckles clenched until they were white.

  An officer of the Brasilian Navy could display many faults from drunkenness to licentiousness and still prosper. Cowardice was the one intolerable weakness.

  “We’d also have a major problem with magnetic forces such as diamagnetism which is the—”

  Finkletop attempted to interrupt. “I know what diamagnetism is but I don’t see—”

  “—temporary opposing magnetic force induced in materials by an ultra-magnetic field. Our ceramic hull is a good example as it is repelled by the star. Other materials are paramagnetic and will be dragged towards it. Furthermore, while naval architects use nonmetallic materials as far as possible in a ship’s construction to limit drag and hence heat build-up while moving through the Continuum sometimes there are no acceptable nonmetallic substitutes. Our large iron heat sinks are a good example.”

  Finkletop tried again. “Well—”

  “So if I dephase at our current location the ship’s hull and heat sinks will push in opposite directions while I try to dodge high velocity debris on chaotic trajectories.”

  Dead silence.

  There was a compromise option. She told herself she was all kinds of a fool for even considering it. Unfortunately, Finkletop was stupid enough to insult her honor without seeing that she would have to call him out. That could wreck her career. No one would openly blame her for protecting her reputation. Nonetheless, she would always be remembered as the captain who killed her charge. Actually, she reflected, Finkletop wasn’t stupid. A Blue Horizon professor just couldn’t be stupid. He was simply incredibly focused and limited in his world view.