Seas of Venus Read online

  Seas of Venus

  by 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 © 2002 by David Drake. Surface Action copyright © 1990 by David Drake, The Jungle copyright © 1991 by David Drake.

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

  A Baen Books Original Omnibus

  Baen Publishing Enterprises

  P.O. Box 1403

  Riverdale, NY 10471

  www.baen.com

  ISBN: 0-7434-3564-8

  Cover art by Bob Eggleton

  First printing, October 2002

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Drake, David.

  Seas of Venus / by David Drake.

  p. cm.

  "A Baen Books original omnibus"—T.p. verso.

  First unified publication of two previously published novels: Surface action and

  The jungle.

  ISBN 0-7434-3564-8

  1. Venus (Planet)—Fiction. 2. Life on other planets—Fiction. 3. Space colonies— Fiction. I. Drake, David. Surface action. II. Drake, David. Jungle. III. Title.

  PS3554.R196 S43 2002

  813'.54—dc21 2002026278

  Distributed by Simon & Schuster

  1230 Avenue of the Americas

  New York, NY 10020

  Production by Windhaven Press, Auburn, NH

  Printed in the United States of America

  The Venus Henry Kuttner and C.L. Moore described in Clash by Night and Fury was among the most vivid creations to appear in Astounding Science Fiction during the greatest years of that magazine. Here David Drake revisits their world with two novels as colorful and imaginative as the originals.

  SURFACE ACTION

  Johnnie Gordon was born to wealth and privilege in the Keeps, but his whole life has been dedicated to becoming a warrior of the Free Companies like his uncle. Now his chance has come—but with it, a deadly struggle through hellish jungle to steal the most powerful battleship in the enemy fleet. If Johnnie succeeds, then one more duty awaits him: a duty that will haunt his nightmares forever. But if he fails, Venus will die as surely as the atom-blasted Earth died; and Mankind will die also.

  THE JUNGLE

  Brainard's torpedoboat was in the wrong place at the wrong time when a salvo of eight-inch shells landed. A few yards to the side and the blasts would've killed him and his crew outright instead of flinging them ashore in their wrecked vessel. Without a radio and on a planet where the winds make aircraft swift suicide, they're dead anyway—unless they can cross the spine of an island through jungle where every animal is a danger and the plants are even worse.

  Brainard and his fellow Free Companions are hard men who've faced death in battle, but now their enemy is a green Hell that wants not only to defeat but to devour them . . . as it will some day devour all of Mankind—unless Brainard and his crew survive, and unless they can turn the lessons they've learned in the jungle against the even greater enemy that lurks in the Keeps themselves!

  Hard-edged politics and combat written by a man who's seen both personally, displayed in a lush setting created by two of the finest SF writers of all time!

  AND A BONUS!

  The author's travelogue of ten days among the real jungles, reefs and ancient temples of Belize, told with the sharpness of observation and anecdote which have made his fiction so vividly memorable.

  BAEN BOOKS by DAVID DRAKE

  RCN series

  With the Lightnings

  Lt. Leary, Commanding

  Hammer's Slammers series

  The Tank Lords

  Caught in the Crossfire

  The Butcher's Bill

  The Sharp End

  Paying the Piper

  Independent Novels &

  Collections

  Seas of Venus

  Foreign Legions

  (created 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

  The Belisarius series:

  (with Eric Flint)

  An Oblique Approach

  In the Heart of Darkness

  Destiny's Shield

  Fortune's Stroke

  The Tide of Victory

  The General series:

  The Forge,

  with S.M. Stirling

  The Chosen,

  with S.M. Stirling

  The Reformer,

  with S.M. Stirling

  The Tyrant, with Eric Flint

  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)

  Armageddon

  (edited with

  Billie Sue Mosiman)

  Introduction: SEA STORIES

  For my thirteenth birthday, my parents gave me a collection of SF (bought from a guy who was entering the Navy) which included The Astounding Science Fiction Anthology. Among many other great stories in the volume—it was John Campbell's own distillation of Golden Age SF, after all—was Clash by Night by Lawrence O'Donnell.

  It was years before I learned that Lawrence O'Donnell was a pseudonym of C.L. Moore and her husband Henry Kuttner. Most O'Donnell stories were written primarily by Moore, but this one seems to have been Kuttner's work in large measure. (After Kuttner's death, Moore renewed the copyright in Kuttner's name alone.)

  Details of authorship didn't matter to me when I was thirteen, and they don't matter a great deal now: Clash by Night really blew me away. A writer is what he reads, and this story marked me to a greater degree than I could've imagined at the time. (Well, at the time I couldn't have imagined that I was going to be a professional writer. Even after twenty-odd years it seems pretty strange.)

  Kuttner and Moore wrote about mercenary soldiers of the future, basing the concept on the Condottieri of Renaissance Italy. These bands were more romantic than most mercenaries (in part because they didn't do a lot of hard fighting), and many writers, Kuttner and Moore included, have emphasized the romantic aspect.

  But the Condottieri were also businessmen—the name means contractor and is the same word you'd use if you were hiring someone to build your house or to carry your goods from Venice to Rome. In recognizing the business aspect of mercenary soldiering, Clash by Night from 1943 is an order of magnitude ahead of most stories about mercenaries written either before or after it.

  I jumped at the opportunity to get Clash by Night reprinted when Marty Greenberg suggested I do a sequel to it for a series of double novels he was packaging. I wrote Surface Action as a thematic sequel which could've been published in Astounding in 1943. In Kuttner and Moore's story, a young soldier who thinks he wants to be a civilian comes to a realization about himself and his world. In mine, a young civilian who thinks he wants to be a soldier reaches a similar insight.

  Surface Action didn't appear in the double series (the details are on my website for those who want them) and was instead published separately. Because it didn't appear with Clash by Night I made minor changes to the terminology, but it remains a direct response—and homage—to the original. I then wrote The Jungle in order to get Clash by Night back in print.

  Surface Action has a simple plot and a structure that would have fit in with the fiction Astounding was publishing in the 1939-43 period (which I and many others consider the Golden Age of Science Fiction). I don't like to repeat myself, so fo
r The Jungle, I went to multiple viewpoints and paired each segment of consecutive narrative with a flashback from the same viewpoint but set at widely varying periods of the past. The structure is more complex even than what I used on the much longer Northworld Trilogy. I'm happy with the way the experiment worked out, but I've never tried to do anything like it again.

  Writing a story always has an element of puzzle in it. These two novels had more than the usual, because I was writing in someone else's universe and using assumptions current in 1940. I doubt that Kuttner and Moore really believed in an ocean-covered Venus, but they could set their story on one without explanation (and indeed, Isaac Asimov could do the same in 1955). Before I could get on with my story, I needed to throw in terraforming and evolutionary developments which are more colorful than probable.

  My story is about people; about the way people feel and think and interact under stress. That's the same subject that Kuttner and Moore addressed, and it's the focus of most of the fiction that interests me.

  The novels gave me scope for writing about the natural world—which in their case was mostly my backyard writ large. I've never subscribed to the suburban dream of neatly manicured lawns. Our present house is in the middle of a 15-acre meadow which we bushhog once or twice a year to keep trees from taking over. At the time I wrote Surface Action and The Jungle we were on a half-acre lot, but we'd deliberately allowed the back—where I wrote outdoors, using laptop computers—to go feral if not exactly wild. This setting added immediacy to the descriptions of hostile blackberries and honeysuckle. Once I had to wait before copying because a jumping spider had crawled into the floppy drive and I didn't want a tragic accident.

  As a whim—mine and Jim Baen's both—this volume also includes an account of my family vacation in the rain forest of Belize. It's not my first experience of real jungles—that came in War Zone C in 1970—but it's by far the more pleasant. Those of you who aren't interested in non-fiction can ignore the travelogue, but those who read it will be able to recognize echoes in future fiction of mine that touches in any way on jungles or lost cities. Based on my stories to date, that'll be a pretty high percentage of my output.

  My main consideration in writing both Surface Action and The Jungle was to get more people to read Clash by Night. If you like what you read here, look for the original; I've reprinted it a couple times myself, and I believe there's an on-line version available for a modest charge.

  Having said that, these novels gave me great pleasure to write. I hope that some of the fun I had will translate to pleasure for the readers.

  Dave Drake

  david-drake.com

  Surface Action

  For Mark L. Van Name

  Who has made my life easier

  as well as more interesting.

  PROLOGUE

  And we are here as on a darkling plain

  Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight

  Where ignorant armies clash by night.

  —Matthew Arnold

  Five hundred years before the first colony ship landed on Venus, an asteroid which had been expanded into a fat nickel-iron balloon impacted with the upper Venerian atmosphere. There it spread its filling of tailored bacteria to graze among the roiling hydrocarbons.

  That was the start of the terraforming process.

  Thousands of asteroid casings followed the first. All the early ones were loaded with bacteria which broke down the poisons, forming free water through biochemical processes and creating mulch as they died and their bodies drifted toward the surface.

  The upper layers of the atmosphere cleared and no longer trapped the sun's heat. The blankets of bacteria moved lower, following the hellish temperatures and poisonous hydrocarbons in which alone they could exist.

  Rain fell—and vaporized again, long before the huge lashing drops had reached the surface. Furnace-hot layers of air cooled and cleared, and the rain continued to fall.

  Even before the Venerian highlands rose above the remaining strata of hydrocarbon haze, asteroids spewed seeds, spores, and Earth-standard one-celled life into the atmosphere. The new cargoes spread and fell with the rain; and mostly died, but not quite all.

  Men sent more asteroids filled with more life, and the life flourished.

  The sheen of water-vapor clouds reflected the dangerous majority of sunlight from the reformed planet, but the short, higher-energy end of the spectrum penetrated the clouds most easily. The actinic rays aided mutation, and the virgin surface of the planet permitted adaptive radiation on a scale never imaginable on Earth.

  Asteroids strewed eggs; at first invertebrates, then those of backboned life forms, though none so advanced that the young required parental care.

  The colony ships arrived.

  In a degree, the planners who seeded Venus with life had been too successful. Land and sea both teemed with a savage parody of "Nature red in fang and claw."

  The seas proved easier to colonize—"at first," the planners said, though the temporary expedient quickly hardened to permanence. Domed cities sprang up on continental shelves a few thousand feet down—beneath the sunlight and the light-driven violence of the surface layers, but well above the scarcely less fierce competition in the deep trenches where all organic matter at last settled.

  Seven days, four hours, and thirty-four minutes after the last colony ship landed on Venus, Earth's final war triggered a fusion reaction in her oceans. By astronomical standards, the resulting star was both small and short-lived; but it would smolder for thousands of years, and its first milliseconds had been enough to cleanse the planet of life.

  Mankind survived in the domes of Venus.

  Only in the domes of Venus.

  The individual cities were independent and fiercely competitive, though the causes of their conflicts had no more logic to those not involved than did the causes of men's wars through the previous ages. Earth's blazing death throes imposed order of a kind on the wars of Venus, but not even that warning trauma could bring peace.

  Nuclear power and weapons were banned, as guns had been banned in Japan during the Shogunate. The ban was enforced with absolute ruthlessness. Domed cities were vulnerable to conventional weapons of the simplest sort. A dome which was believed to harbor nuclear experiments was cracked so that water pressure crushed its inhabitants into the ooze before they could drown.

  Apart from that, war on Venus was fought on the surface, and by warriors.

  Independent contractors, like the condottieri of Renaissance Italy, built bases and fleets with private funding and staffed them with volunteers. They fought one another for hire, and in the interim they fought the jungles for their very lives.

  Domes went to war according to set rules. When battle and mercenaries' blood had decided the point at issue, the losing city ransomed itself to penury. The winning dome recouped the cost of the fleet it hired, and the winning military entrepreneurs collected a comfortable victory bonus.

  The losing mercenaries had the amount of their original hire and whatever they had managed to save from the wrack of defeat. That might be enough for them to go on to lesser contracts, desperately trying to rebuild their fortunes; or they might be forced to merge with another company on unfavorable terms.

  Sometimes they merged with the fleet which had just defeated them. Business was business.

  The fleets seemed a romantic alternative to life in the climate-controlled safety of the domed cities. Civilians aped the dress and manners of the mercenaries or scorned them, but no one in the domes could ignore fleet personnel in their uniforms and their dark-tanned skins.

  There was no shortage of volunteers to take up the reality of the romantic challenge. . . .

  1

  A taster of wine, with an eye for a maid,

  Never too bold, and never afraid. . . .

  —Bliss Carman

  The crowd in Carnaval finery burst apart with a collective shriek.

  The man forcing his way toward Johnnie through the revelers
had a stubble beard and a wild look in his eyes. His left arm clamped a woman against his chest like the figurehead of a packet ship. Her domino mask hung from one ear. There were scratches on her collarbone, and the gauzy blouse had been shredded away from her breasts.

  The man's right hand waved a butcher knife with an eight-inch blade.

  "All right, you whore!" the man screamed. His dilated pupils weren't focused on anything in his present surroundings. "You want to spread it around, I'll help you spread it around!"

  The knife slipped like a chord of light-struck ripple toward the woman's belly.

  Johnnie's right hand dropped as he swung his hips to the left. The hem of his scarlet tunic had tiny weights in it, so that the ruffed flare stood out as his body moved—

  Clearing the pistol holstered high on Johnnie's right hip.

  The woman's body shielded all of the madman except his arms and the wedge of face including his staring, bloodshot eyes. The Carnaval crowd was a montage of silks and shrieks surrounding the event.

  Johnnie's hand curved up with the pistol; faster than a snake striking, faster than the knife. For an instant that trembled like the sun on dew, the line of the pistol barrel joined Johnnie's eye and the madman's.

  The muzzle lifted with a flash and a haze of clean-burning propellant. The sharp crack! of muzzle blast slapped through the screams. The madman's right eye socket was empty as his body spasmed backward in a tetanic arch. His arms lashed apart, flinging the woman to one side and the butcher knife to the other.

  Johnnie took a deep breath and loaded a fresh magazine from the pouch on his left hip, where it balanced the weight of the pistol. The holographic ambiance faded, leaving behind a large room whose walls were gray with a covering of vitalon, a super-cooled liquid which absorbed bullet impacts within its dense interior.