Voyage Across the Stars Read online

  Table of Contents

  GODS AND MONSTERS: DRAKE’S NEW MYTHOLOGY

  STARTING A LONG WAY FROM HERE

  ACROSS THE STARS

  DEDICATION

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  CHAPTER ONE

  CHAPTER TWO

  CHAPTER THREE

  CHAPTER FOUR

  CHAPTER FIVE

  CHAPTER SIX

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  CHAPTER NINE

  CHAPTER TEN

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

  CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

  CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

  CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

  CHAPTER THIRTY

  CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE

  CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO

  CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE

  CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR

  CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE

  AFTERWORD:

  THE VOYAGE

  DEDICATION

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  TELARIA

  AJAX FOUR

  MIRANDOLA

  PAIXHANS’ NODE

  BURR-DETLINGEN

  THESOLE SOLUTION

  BUIN

  PANCAHTE

  WASATCH 1029

  KAZAN

  CELANDINE

  DELL

  TELARIA

  AUTHOR’S NOTE

  Voyage

  Across

  the

  Stars

  DAVID

  DRAKE

  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

  What Distant Deeps

  The Road of Danger

  (forthcoming)

  Hammer’s Slammers

  The Tank Lords

  Caught in the Crossfire

  The Butcher’s Bill

  The Sharp End

  The Complete Hammer’s Slammers, Vol. 1 (omnibus)

  The Complete Hammer’s Slammers, Vol. 2 (omnibus)

  The Complete Hammer’s Slammers, Vol. 3 (omnibus)

  Independent Novels

  and Collections

  The Reaches Trilogy

  Seas of Venus

  Foreign Legions, David Drake, ed.

  Ranks of Bronze

  Cross the Stars

  Loose Cannon

  Northworld Trilogy

  Patriots

  Redliners

  Starliner

  All the Way to the Gallows

  Grimmer Than Hell

  Into the Hinterlands (with John Lambshead)

  Voyage Across the Stars (omnibus)

  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 Before Dawn (omnibus)

  Destiny’s Shield

  Fortune’s Stroke

  Belisarius II: Storm at Noontide (omnibus)

  The Tide of Victory

  The Dance of Time

  Belisarius III: The Flames of Sunset (omnibus)

  Edited by David Drake

  The World Turned Upside Down

  (with Jim Baen & Eric Flint)

  VOYAGE ACROSS THE STARS

  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.

  Preface copyright © 2012 by Cecelia Holland. Introduction copyright © 2012 by David Drake. Cross the Stars copyright © 1984 by David Drake. The Voyage copyright © 1994 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: 978-1-4516-3771-7

  Cover art by Sam Kennedy

  First Baen paperback printing, January 2012

  Distributed by Simon & Schuster

  1230 Avenue of the Americas

  New York, NY 10020

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Drake, David.

  Voyage across the stars / by David Drake.

  p. cm.

  ISBN 978-1-4516-3771-7 (omni trade pb)

  I. Title.

  PS3554.R196V73 2012

  813'.54--dc23

  2011040759

  Printed in the United States of America

  10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  GODS AND MONSTERS:

  DRAKE’S NEW

  MYTHOLOGY

  They still call to us, the old stories. Cocooned in our air-conditioned, insulated buildings dozens of feet from the earth, the sky obscured, we still hear the ancient tales and in them we can still remember who we were. The human hero, caught between the monsters and the gods, uses courage, strength and boldness to restore the fundamental order. This satisfies our deepest sense of justice, of virtue.

  That in our time, courage, strength and boldness seem to have priced themselves out of the virtue market makes this kind of exercise even more valuable. From Joyce to the Coen Brothers the story of Odysseus comes at us from all angles, and the story of the Argonauts appeals ever more to the special-effects-besotted movies.

  In the hands of a master like David Drake the old tales echo with unexpected meanings and analogies, a sly reference to a rosy fingered dawn, the monster with fewer than two eyes. His own monsters are sensational, as always. Nobody does monsters better than David Drake; they are forever bursting terrifically up from the sea or out of the earth itself, all spines and tentacles and horrible teeth.

  Much of the delight of these two works is the way Drake manipulates the original to fit his space-opera setting, like the evolution of the Golden Fleece into some kind of instantaneous transporter, in The Voyage, or any of the weird worlds in Cross the Stars that mark Don Slade’s desperate struggle to get home. These are gifts of a resourceful mind conversant in both worlds, and illuminate both: the magical elements of the Greek myth become a technological marvel in the space-opera and you see how both fit into their cultures’ value systems.

  The deeper message is in the differences between the Greeks and us, because Don Slade may seem to be operating in some parallel universe, but these books, like all fiction, are ultimately about us, about our moral universe.

  The Greek gods control what happens in both the originating myths. These gods are real, are outside human existence, are other. The moral dilemmas they represent are beyond the ability of mortals to address; the order which determines right or wrong belongs to the gods, not to men.

  So the Greeks needed to purge the common mind of terror and pity, but not guilt.

  The modern world has turned that all inside, and made the irreconcilable demand
s of life into a constant test, and one we often fail. Exchanging magic for technology makes the human hero suddenly liable for a lot more. Now we’re alone, and the monsters are still there, in the dark, rising furious from the depths. Drake roars back through his indomitable heroes, he blasts out his rockets of words, but the monsters never die. As he says of Don Slade, “they are part of what had forged him,” and all of us, those monsters from within. But we are our own gods now, and we can’t escape.

  Cecelia Holland

  STARTING A LONG WAY FROM HERE

  This volume collects Cross the Stars and The Voyage, two cases where I recast an Ancient Greek epic as an SF adventure novel (a space opera). My undergraduate (double) majors were History and Latin, so that may seem an obvious thing for me to try; in fact it wasn’t. (I’ve missed seeing a lot of things that seem obvious after the fact.)

  In 1980, I quit lawyering and was driving a bus for the Town of Chapel Hill. While sitting in the bus garage between runs, I wrote a letter to a friend in which I commented that the Odyssey could be rewritten as a Western, though of course I didn’t write Westerns. As the words came off my pen, it struck me that I did write SF; what was true for a horse opera would probably work for a space opera as well.

  Nothing happened for a few months. Then Jim Baen called and offered me a two-book contract: a big book for $10K and a little book for $7,500. I said “Yes!” immediately. (I’ve done a lot of dumb things, but I was never dumb enough to turn that down. I made $6,100 during my year of bus driving).

  Then, because at the time both Jim and I thought that we ought to know what the books would be about, I said the big book would be what became Birds of Prey (my working title was The Warm Summer Rain; note what I said above about doing a lot of dumb things) and the little book would be a rewrite of the Odyssey. That was off the top of my head, but it seemed like a good idea on reflection also. (Almost immediately thereafter I became a full-time writer, though the decision didn’t have as direct a connection as it may seem to.)

  I wrote Birds of Prey first (I had been trying to write it for more than a decade). Then I reread the Odyssey (for the umpteenth time, of course), making a précis of everything that happened in it.

  Until I made the précis, I didn’t have a real understanding of the way the Odyssey is paced and connected. Almost all the incidents which people (myself included until then) think of as being the Odyssey occur in one book: after dinner on the island of Scheria, Odysseus recounts to his hosts the things he claims have happened to him since he left Troy. Homer doesn’t tell the reader about the Cyclops: that’s a story which Odysseus tells to King Alcinous and his other guests.

  I mentioned this development to Jim in one of our regular phone calls. “But you don’t have to do it that way,” he said.

  Which took me aback. Of course I had to do it that way! It’s that way in the original.

  Then I actually thought about the situation instead of just reacting. I wasn’t going to be graded on my understanding of the Odyssey; my present job was to tell a good story in English. That meant the form of the story had to be translated, as surely as the language in which I told it.

  This was a typical case in which I benefited from being Jim Baen’s friend (because we were chatting as friends, not as editor and writer). There were many similar instances on both sides. Over the years, Jim and I saved one another from ourselves as a regular thing.

  I already understood that I would have to adapt the incidents of the Odyssey functionally, not simply copy them. A one-eyed giant is a credible threat to an Iron Age chieftain, but such a creature doesn’t read the same in relation to the commander of a high-tech combat unit.

  Finally, I had to allow for cultural as well as technological differences. Odysseus caps his victory by slowly strangling—the process is described in some detail—the female servants who have been sleeping with Penelope’s suitors.

  This is only one example (although a pretty striking one) of normal behavior in an Iron Age culture which is unacceptable in a society that I (or anybody I want as a reader) would choose to live in. I might’ve been stupid enough to follow the structure of an ancient epic in a modern space opera, but I wasn’t going to describe a hero with the worldview of a death camp guard.

  Adapting the Odyssey was the second most important lesson I got writing. (The most important was learning that I needed to outline.)

  Since Cross the Stars I use the same process on all material, historical as well as fiction. First I consider the requirements of my medium; space opera, military SF, and fantasy all start from different assumptions. Then I look at the functional effect of every element of the original.

  Only when I’ve completed those basics do I begin to plot my novel. Paying the Piper is military SF based in Hellenistic history; The Voyage (included in this volume), is space opera based on the Argonautica of Apollonius of Rhodes. I developed both of them and many other stories by using the technique I learned by writing Cross the Stars.

  There’s one other thing to mention: I don’t forget the original while I’m writing. In Cross the Stars you’ll find hints of Homer’s words as well as his story. I’ll never be the writer Homer was (nobody else will either, but that’s another matter), but I’m better for having read him than I would have been without his example.

  Dave Drake

  david-drake.com

  ACROSS

  THE

  STARS

  DEDICATION

  To Jim Baen,

  for ten years of making me a better writer,

  and for acting as a friend.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  This novel began in discussions with Glenn Knight, while we were some thousands of miles apart. Jim Baen and Bernadette Bosky were of inestimable help in matters of direction. Karl Wagner—kindly old Doc Wagner—provided technical data as always. When my nerves were frazzled, Sharon Pigott spent an evening keying in the last of the rough draft and saving me a further day and a half of crushing work. And my wife, Jo, made friendly, dispassionate, enormously helpful comments on that rough.

  Blessings to you all.

  CHAPTER ONE

  A hologram of a tank, bow-on as it plowed through a brushfire, filled most of the wall behind President Hammer’s desk. Either by chance or through Hammer’s deliberation, the tank was Two Star—Danny Pritchard’s unit twenty years before, when he had been a sergeant in the Slammers and not Hammer’s chosen successor.

  “Hey, snake,” the President called cheerfully when he saw it was Pritchard who had entered the office unannounced.

  Hammer tilted away the desk display which he had been studying. He had not let age and the presidency blunt all the edges of his appearance. If Hammer’s hair was its natural gray now, then it was still naturally his own. His shoulders and wrists would have done credit to a larger, younger man. There was a paunch below desk height that had not been there five years before, however. No practical amount of exercise could wholly replace the field work of the lifetime previous. “Had a chance to glance over the proposal from Dominica?”

  “Glance, yes,” Danny said, perching himself on the arm of an easy chair instead of the seat. The fabric responded to his weight, squirming in an attempt to mold itself to his contours. Pritchard preferred a solid bench, so he gave as little purchase as possible to the luxury with which Hammer disarmed visitors. “I like the idea of having somebody else pay for part of our army, sure . . . and, well, train it while things are quiet here on Friesland. But I think Dominica’s too far if we—needed the guns back in a hurry.”

  Danny popped the rolled notes he held against his knee. It was a sign of the nervousness which he otherwise controlled. “Thing is, Alois,” he continued to the older man, “that isn’t what was on my mind right at the moment.” He smiled. “Even though it should have been.”

  Hammer snorted. He spun his desk display toward his Adjutant and heir presumptive. “Teitjens sent this over as background before he briefs me on the slump in heavy equipment exp
ort projections. I’d sooner listen to you, on the assumption that I’ll at least understand your problem when you’ve finished.”

  “Yeah, well,” the younger man agreed. “The problem’s easy.”

  He slid down into the cup of the chair after all. The office walls were a slowly-moving fog-blue, almost a gray. Pritchard slitted his eyelids. The hologram behind the President could have been a real tank on a skyswept plain. “We got a homeworld query on one of our veterans. Do you remember Captain Don Slade?”

  Hammer nodded calmly over his clasped hands. “Mad Dog Slade? Sure, I remember him. He was the one man I really wanted who insisted on retiring when he heard his father’d died. Home to Tethys, wasn’t it? The Omicron Eridani Tethys, I mean. I offered him a duchy here on Friesland, too, Danny.”

  “Via, he was a duke back home, Colonel,” Pritchard said to the blurred man and to the tank. “He was the next thing to a king there if he’d wanted to be.” The Adjutant opened his eyes again and sat as erect as the cushions would permit him. “We were—well, he did me a favor. We were friends, Don and me. Tell the truth, he didn’t much like to be called Mad Dog.”

  “Well,” Hammer said with a laugh, “if he’ll come back, I’ll call him Duke Donald or any curst thing he chooses. Not because he’s a friend of yours, Danny—though that too—but because you can’t have too many people like Slade on your side.” The President did not precisely frown, but his face lost most of its laughter. “Among other reasons, because if they’re on your side, they aren’t on the other guy’s.”

  “I think Don had had about enough of sides when he left here,” Pritchard said. He looked up at the ceiling and remembered his big, black-haired friend in the spaceport at their last meeting. “He said he was ready to spend the rest of his life fishing like his grandfather.”