Patriots Read online

  PATRIOTS

  David Drake

  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 © 1996, by David Drake

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

  A Baen Book

  Baen Publishing Enterprises

  P.O. Box 1403

  Riverdale, NY 10471

  www.baen.com

  ISBN: 978-1-4391-3292-0

  Cover art by Kurt Miller

  First Baen paperback printing, September 2009

  Distributed by Simon & Schuster

  1230 Avenue of the Americas

  New York, NY 10020

  Printed in the United States of America

  To Harriet McDougal

  A wonderful editor whose suggestions not only make my prose better, but also make it more the way I wanted it to be in the first place.

  BAEN BOOKS by DAVID DRAKE

  The RCN Series

  With the Lightnings

  Lt. Leary, Commanding

  The Far Side of the Stars

  The Way to Glory

  Some Golden Harbor

  When the Tide Rises

  In the Stormy Red Sky

  Hammer's Slammers

  The Tank Lords

  Caught in the Crossfire

  The Butcher's Bill

  The Sharp End

  Paying the Piper

  Independent Novels

  and Collections

  The Reaches Trilogy

  Seas of Venus

  Foreign Legions,

  ed. by David Drake

  Ranks of Bronze

  Cross the Stars

  The Dragon Lord

  Birds of Prey

  Northworld Trilogy

  Redliners

  Starliner

  All the Way to the Gallows

  Grimmer Than Hell

  Other Times Than Peace

  The Undesired Princess and The Enchanted Bunny

  (with L. Sprague de Camp)

  Lest Darkness Fall and To Bring the Light

  (with L. Sprague de Camp)

  Killer

  (with Karl Edward Wagner)

  The General Series

  Warlord with S.M. Stirling (omnibus)

  Conqueror

  with S.M. Stirling (omnibus)

  The Chosen

  with S.M. Stirling

  The Reformer

  with S.M. Stirling

  The Tyrant with Eric Flint

  The Belisarius Series

  with Eric Flint

  An Oblique Approach

  In the Heart of Darkness

  Belisarius I: Thunder at Dawn (omnibus)

  Destiny's Shield

  Fortune's Stroke

  Belisarius II: Storm at Noontide (omnibus)

  Belisarius III:

  The Flames of Sunset

  (omnibus)

  Edited by David Drake

  Armageddon

  (with Billie Sue Mosiman)

  The World Turned

  Upside Down

  (with Jim Baen & Eric Flint)

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  Clyde and Carlie Howard, Gordon R. Dickson,

  and Tom Doherty all provided help I needed to make this a better book. They're a perfect answer to the folks who claim that "Nobody cares anymore."

  If you care, you'll find that other people care too.

  AUTHOR'S NOTE

  Truth, Heroism, and Other

  Confusing Subjects

  Some years ago I thought that by studying history I'd learn the truth about what happened in the past. I've become perhaps wiser and certainly more cautious in my assumptions as I've grown older. I still believe in truth in an absolute sense. I just don't believe that human beings will ever run into it.

  I'm not really sure about why I did some of the things I've done. The reasons I thought I did them were almost certainly, it now seems, not the real reasons. Do I know the real reasons? Well, maybe, but chances are that another ten or twenty-five years of distance and experience will give me a still different take on what was going on.

  The above disclaimer is a prelude to me saying that as best I can tell, the action of Patriots is based pretty much on the way things happened in Vermont—then the New Hampshire Grants—just before the start of the American Revolution. (I modeled the climax on the capture of Fort Ticonderoga by Ethan Allen and the Green Mountain Boys.) I don't know about history classes nowadays but believe me, this isn't the way I learned about it in high school.

  The cannon captured at Fort Ticonderoga were virtually the only heavy ordnance the fledgling Continental Army had. Without them the British would have continued to hold Boston and might have snuffed out the rebellion before it got properly under way. It startled me to learn that their capture was the next thing to an accident rather than the result of somebody's careful plan.

  The trouble with history survey courses is that they only have space to tell you that X did Y and the result was Z. That may well be correct, but it leaves you with the impression that X did Y to achieve Z. More often than not it turns out that X didn't imagine Z, and chances are he/she didn't even intend to do Y. Remember, Columbus died convinced that he'd discovered not America but a new route to India.

  I started researching the capture of Fort Ticonderoga in the belief that the Green Mountain Boys were a citizens' militia like the Minutemen in Massachusetts and that Ethan Allen was an American patriot in the mold of Paul Revere. It quickly became obvious that the Green Mountain Boys were closer in purpose and tactics to Quantrill's Raiders—or the Kansas Jayhawkers who opposed them. As for Ethan Allen himself, he was a unique individual in a time that had more than its share of them.

  Vermont was really beyond America's wild frontier until the end of the French and Indian War in 1763. At that point the land which had been granted conflictingly by royal governors in both New Hampshire and New York started to be worth something. The folks who'd already settled on the land did so mostly under New Hampshire grants. New York had a better claim and the New York authorities were ready to assert that claim in their own courts, with New York sheriffs enforcing the decisions.

  On the other side were investors, mostly in Connecticut, who held large undeveloped tracts under New Hampshire grants, and the settlers who were already in the area. Men and women who'd risked everything in the face of Indian raids to build homes in the wilderness weren't going to roll over and play dead when a New York process server arrived. The settlers had political and financial backing from the Connecticut investors, and for a leader they had Ethan Allen.

  Ethan Allen was a smart, enormously strong man whose idea of a good time was to get drunk and smash up a tavern. He and his family had been run out of Massachusetts. He'd never committed a crime for gain, but he was too raucously violent to live in what passed for civilized society even on the edges of the American colonies.

  The militia that Allen raised, the Green Mountain Boys, were local men who would lose everything (including support for their families) if the New York officials had their way. They were hard, tough fellows or they wouldn't have chosen to settle a wilderness and been able to survive. They were operating outside of any law, and they knew they'd be hanged if they fell into the hands of their enemies.

  There's no evidence that the Green Mountain Boys ever used deadly force in their activities. To me this is the most remarkable tribute of all to Ethan Allen. For what the struggle could have been—almost certainly would have been—without him, look at the activities of Quantrill and the Jayhawkers of Bloody Kansas in the 1850s.

  Oh, neither Allen nor the men under him would e
ver be mistaken for saints. The Green Mountain Boys burned houses, beat men in front of their families, and in one case hoisted an unfortunate traveler from New York onto a flagpole and left him there all day. Nonetheless they didn't kill, maim, or attempt to kill and maim their opponents.

  The British government had to some degree supported the Vermont settlers against the New York authorities. Apparently the only reason the Green Mountain Boys acted suddenly and effectively against the British at the beginning of the Revolutionary War is that Ethan Allen himself decided they ought to.

  Nobody knows why he did that. Nobody knew at the time it happened, and I'd venture a guess that Allen himself couldn't have told you the real reason. My guess, based on having a friend or two of a similar type, is that it seemed like an interesting thing to try at the time; and Ethan Allen never did anything with less than a hundred and ten percent enthusiasm.

  Allen didn't capture Fort Ticonderoga because he was a patriot who believed in America in the sense we'd mean that now. Later during the Revolution he negotiated with the British in an attempt to make Vermont a province of Canada. When he wrote an account of the capture four years later he claimed he summoned the British commander to surrender "in the name of the Great Jehovah and the Continental Congress," but chances are he hadn't heard of the Continental Congress at the time. (There's even less chance that he said anything about Jehovah: Allen was a noted atheist and reputed to be the most profane man in America.)

  I've told you that Ethan Allen and the Green Mountain Boys weren't the people I thought they were when I began to research this novel. I'm not saying that they weren't heroes and patriots.

  What I am saying is that heroes and patriots are real human beings, only maybe more so. They're not perfect and they're not saints; they do things for the same sort of fuzzy reasons that you and I do. But at the end of the day, the things they've done have made the future.

  And you know, maybe you and I ought sometimes to think about the future we're making.

  —Dave Drake

  Chatham County, NC

  1. Downtown Dittersdorf

  Two men entered through the caravansary's main door beside Mark. "Here, Doc," one of them said to the other. "Let me take that load for you. You're still tuckered from the ship."

  Mark turned to glance at the speaker. His Quelhagen upbringing protested that it was impolite to look at strangers, but the booming voice was the first cheerful thing he'd heard on Dittersdorf.

  The fellow carried on one shoulder a packing case as big as he was—which made it a large case. Rain dripped from his poncho, the broad brim of his hat, and his flaring red mustache. For all that he beamed like summer sunshine as he took the bag from his companion and tossed it expertly on top of the packing case, a minuscule addition to his previous load.

  The big man noticed Mark and gave him a merry nod as he and his companion strode across the common area to their room. Mark sighed and returned to staring at the jumble of items in the caravansary's dead storage room.

  Dittersdorf wasn't a planet of any significance for its own manufactures or agriculture, but the spaceport on Dittersdorf Major was a stopping point for ships traveling between the worlds of the Three Digits and the rest of the settled universe. The gear abandoned in the caravansary was so varied that Mark couldn't guess what most of it was, much less whether it might be useful to him on the frontier.

  "Guess you'd be from Earth?" said the watchman, a fat man with a bad limp and a constant wheeze.

  "From Quelhagen, sir," Mark said. He was twenty-two standard—Earth—years old, thin and brown-haired. He felt as though there were a six-inch glass wall between him and the boisterous chaos behind him.

  The caravansary was a circular building with a domed roof. The doors of windowless rooms around the circumference opened onto the common court in the center. The watchman's kiosk was beside the outer door, and the first room was used to store the goods that travelers left behind, sometimes because they'd died. The caravansary staff sold the leavings for what they brought. Inevitably, the collection had been picked over many times before Mark took the watchman's invitation to look at it. Most of what remained was junk.

  "Quelhagen and Zenith, they're the same as Earth, pretty much," the watchman said. He scratched himself, bored but mildly hopeful that Mark would find something worth beer money. "They're all built up just like Earth."

  "Not at all," Mark said. He spoke calmly and precisely, without any emotional loading. Quelhagen's social style was quiet reserve, even among friends. Mark, so alone that he didn't even feel he was of the same species as the frontiersmen with whom he shared the caravansary, had completely shut down his emotions. "Landingplace is the largest city on Quelhagen as well as being our capital, but it would be a minor community even in the interior of the Atlantic Alliance. On the Atlantic Circuit, why, I've seen buildings more populous than Landingplace."

  That was an exaggeration, but not an enormous one. Mark had seen arcologies holding a hundred thousand people, but he doubted there were any quite as big as the quarter million who by now lived in Landingplace.

  He took a holoviewer from beneath a bundle of clothing barely fit to become wiping rags. The viewer was a dedicated unit, loaded and sealed instead of having a socket in which different chips could be placed.

  When Mark switched the viewer on, it projected a spray of flowers and vegetables in the air of the room. SUNRISE SEEDS CATALOG FOR 2249, read a legend in fluorescent letters. YOUR BEST CHOICE FOR QUALITY, PRICE, AND VARIETY!

  The watchman spit onto the floor of the courtyard. When Mark had arrived, a few hours earlier, a pair of men whose ankles were chained to their waists had been hosing the caravansary down. The bare concrete was already returning to a state of mud and squalor.

  "Salesman from Hestia," the watchman explained, tapping the holoviewer with his finger. "Earth company he traveled for, but he was Hestian. Caught a bug or a bellyful of the wrong whiskey, I guess. Either way, it carried him off. Had some nice clothes, but they went right off."

  He yawned and scratched himself again. "You like flowers?" he asked in vague hope.

  "I don't mind them," Mark said, putting the viewer back on the pile where he'd found it.

  A man in a rain-sodden poncho and muddy boots strode through the caravansary's personnel door. He shouted "Hey you! Wake up!" to the watchman and opened the double-panel vehicle door, which latched only on the inside. Three similar men and the high-wheeled cart they were pushing stood on the apron.

  The downpour of an hour ago was over. The drizzle Mark saw beyond the open door was fog a trifle too heavy to remain suspended. Lights gleamed in the windows of buildings otherwise concealed by the gloom.

  Mark noticed a one-cubic-foot carrying case. Its hard shell was decorated in the blue-white-gray crystalline pattern of blue john, the myrrhine that the ancient Romans had used for their most valuable cups. He tugged the case out of a jumble of chipboard containers full of obviously broken appliances.

  "Ah," said the watchman approvingly. "That's a bit of a grab bag, sir. From the weight there's something inside, but you'll have to cut it apart to open it. There's no latch, you see."

  The four new arrivals pushed their cart into the caravansary, slipping and swearing. The vehicle was loaded—overloaded—with a dozen large trunks of uniform design. Their ends were stenciled BIBER/ZENITH/IN CARE OF GRIGGS/N OF 12—DO NOT SEPARATE. The cargo handlers had piled individual gear—duffel bags and bedrolls—on top of the trunks. Splotches of mud indicated that several of the bags had fallen on the path from the ship to the caravansary.

  "Hey, fatso!" called the man who'd opened the larger doors. "Give us a room. And don't say you haven't got one, because we'll clear one ourselves if we've got to. This baggage belongs to Mayor Heinrich Biber, it does. Mayor of New Paris on Zenith!"

  The watchman, obviously nervous about leaving Mark alone in the dead storage, nonetheless turned his attention to the newcomers. "Thirty-seven's empty, sirs," he said. "Ah—
will Mayor Biber be staying here himself tonight?"

  "Dream on, fatso!" another of the new arrivals said. "The Honorable Heinrich Biber is returning by yacht in two stages, leaving dogs like us to carry his luggage by freighter."

  "Twelve bloody stages from Kilbourn to Zenith," the original spokesman added. "And we'll be lucky if it isn't bloody thirteen! Get moving, boys."

  Biber's servants braced themselves against the luggage trolley.

  "You'll have to wait—" the watchman began, trotting over to the receipt pad he'd left in his kiosk.

  "We don't have to do any damned thing!" the spokesman snarled. "And if you don't keep out of our way, you'll find wheel tracks running the length of you!"

  Mark grimaced as he knelt before the stone-finished carrying case. He didn't blame the servants for being in an ill temper after shifting that heavy load through the rain, but . . . Room 37 was next to Mark's own Room 36. He'd have preferred other neighbors. Still, the caravansary was built from cast concrete, including the partition walls between individual cells. The interior of Room 36 was dark and dank, but it was certainly private.

  Mark had insisted that, having completed his education on Earth, he wanted to visit the frontier for himself instead of taking articles as an attorney's clerk with his father or one of his father's Quelhagen friends. This caravansary was what visiting the frontier meant.

  The case was of a sort introduced on Earth within the past two years. The pattern of "crystals" on two of the corners rotated. The latch could be set to a nearly infinite series of combinations, but most users just left the cases on the original setting: both latches identical, with the peak of a large white crystal bisecting each corner.

  The watchman closed the large doors, then dithered a moment as he glanced between Mark and the luggage trolley squealing its way across the common area. At last he trotted after the new arrivals, waving his receipt book. Nobody yet had been able to open the case, so he probably thought it was proof against Mark's examination.