The Reaches Read online

  The Reaches

  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.

  Introduction copyright © 2004 by David Drake; Igniting the Reaches copyright © 1994; Through the Breach copyright © 1995; Fireships copyright © 1996; all by David Drake.

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

  A Baen Megabook

  Baen Publishing Enterprises

  P.O. Box 1403

  Riverdale, NY 10471

  www.baen.com

  ISBN: 0-7434-7177-6

  Cover art by Stephen Hickman

  First omnibus hardcover printing, January 2004

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Drake, David.

  The reaches / David Drake.

  p. cm.

  "A Baen Megabook."

  ISBN 0-7434-7177-6

  1. Interplanetary voyages--Fiction. 2. Life on other

  planets--Fiction. 3. Space ships--Fiction. I. Title.

  PS3554.R196R425 2004

  813'.54--dc22

  2003020725

  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 RCN Series

  With the Lightnings

  Lt. Leary, Commanding

  The Far Side of the Stars

  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

  Hammer's Slammers

  The Tank Lords

  Caught in the Crossfire

  The Butcher's Bill

  The Sharp End

  Paying the Piper

  The Belisarius Series

  with Eric Flint

  An Oblique Approach

  In the Heart of Darkness

  Destiny's Shield

  Fortune's Stroke

  The Tide of Victory

  Independent Novels and Collections

  The Reaches Trilogy

  Seas of Venus

  Foriegn Legions, edited 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

  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)

  Killer

  (with Karl Edward Wagner)

  INTRODUCTION:

  The One That Got Away

  I'm a very organized writer—insanely organized, one might say, and we'll get back to that in a moment. I take extensive notes before I start plotting, and I do very detailed plots (usually in the range of 5–15,000 words per plot, though a few have been much longer).

  Occasionally I hear a writer say something along the lines of "My hero went off in a direction I didn't expect." I shake my head: my heroes don't do anything of the sort. It turned out, however, that they could still surprise me.

  I got the notion of using the Age of Discovery as the background for a series of space operas. I'd bought a set (eight volumes) of Hakluyt's Voyages (the 1598 edition, which adds a great deal of material but drops David Ingram's very interesting account from the 1589 edition) while I was still an undergraduate and dipped into it frequently. When I chose that world for my setting, I read and took notes of the whole work. I then started plotting.

  The life of Francis, later Sir Francis, Drake lent itself to development into a trilogy: his first voyages to the Caribbean, which made him an enemy of Spain and gained him a name; the round the world voyage of 1580–1, which brought him great wealth and a knighthood; and finally the climactic struggle against the Armada. I actually followed Drake's life quite closely, but especially in the second book I wove in events which happened to some of his contemporaries.

  Though Drake was my model, I didn't attempt to tell the stories from his viewpoint. He's a very attractive man in many ways. His luck was in great measure the result of careful planning. For example, he didn't lose a man to scurvy, the deficiency disease which nearly wiped out Magellan's crew during the only round the world voyage preceding Drake's. Anson, a century and a half later, was still losing large numbers of crewmen to scurvy. Drake had figured out something that the greatest navigators before and after him did not, to their great cost.

  Furthermore, in a cruel age and under brutal conditions, Drake wasn't himself cruel and didn't allow those under him to practice cruelty. This is truly remarkable, more remarkable than readers who haven't been in hard places themselves can imagine. Drake, suffering a painful wound from an Indian ambush, prevented his men from bombarding the Indian village. He said, probably correctly, that the Indians mistook him for a Spaniard—but the man who could do that after an arrow has been pulled from his face was humane in the best sense of the word.

  But.

  Drake was a religious fanatic and a fanatical patriot. He had sufficient reason—Philip II of Spain was a tyrant from the same mold as later provided the world with Hitler—and Drake's behavior was almost invariably within what now are accepted civilized norms. (The one instance of a war crime in modern terms involved hanging a hostage priest and promising to hang more if the Spaniard who'd murdered an envoy under a white flag weren't surrendered for punishment.)

  But if what Drake did is acceptable, what he was is not. I don't say that I couldn't get into the mind of a fanatic, but the world and my world wouldn't be better places if I did so. I told the story—the stories—from the point of view of fictional sidekicks who, though men of their times, took a detached attitude toward the great issues of their day. Men, in short, who weren't very different from me.

  I won't say that was a mistake, but I think it is the reason that the wheels came off my careful plan. Those viewpoint characters turned out to have minds of their own: my mind. And as a result, the novels weren't at all what I'd intended them to be.

  That's the background to The Reaches. I'll now offer three . . . well, call them caveats regarding the books themselves.

  1) I postulated a future in which war had brought Mankind to the brink of extinction. The civilization that returns is based on individual craftsmanship, not mass production (although that's clearly on its way back by the end of the series). Some readers, faced with stories in which the characters fly starships but fight (some of them) with single-shot rifles, were not only baffled but infuriated.

  2) Though I didn't use ideologues for my viewpoint characters, the period itself was fiercely ideological. I didn't attempt to hide that reality by inventing characters with modern sensibilities to exclaim with horror at situations which everyone of the day took for granted. Thus the books are deeply steeped in ideology that readers may find not only foreign but distasteful.

  3) Finally, I'd intended The Reaches to be light space opera, the sort of thing I later did in the RCN series. Space opera they are, but they're very hard, harsh books. Through the Breach in particular is a more realistic view of what war does to a citizen/soldier than Redliners was. I'm more self-aware now than I was when I wrote the series, but I'm honestly not sure whether more than c
hance was involved in my choosing to write Through the Breach in first person, which is nearly unique in my fiction.

  There's no single Truth in my world, but there are lots of little truths. There are several of those woven into The Reaches, but they're not all of them the truths that make me happiest in the hours before dawn.

  Dave Drake

  david-drake.com

  Igniting the Reaches

  To Rana Van Name

  Who first heard about this one

  when we were all going off to dinner;

  And who is special.

  1

  Above Salute

  Piet Ricimer stood out like an open flame on the crowded, cluttered bridge of the Sultan as she orbited Salute. Stephen Gregg was amused by the young officer's flashy dress.

  Well, Ricimer was no younger than Gregg himself—but Gregg, as a member of a factorial family, was mature in ways that no sailor would ever be. More sophisticated, at any rate. Realizing that sophistication and maturity might not be the same made Gregg frown for a moment until he focused on the discussion again.

  "I suppose it might be Salute," mumbled Bivens, the navigator. Gregg had already marked Bivens down as a man who never saw a planetfall he liked—or was sure he could identify.

  "Look, of course it's Salute!" insisted Captain Choransky, commander of the Sultan and the other two ships of the argosy. "It's just this tub's lousy optics that makes it hard to tell."

  His vehemence made the landfall seem as doubtful as Bivens' concern had done. This was Gregg's first voyage off Venus, much less out of the solar system. He was too young at twenty-two Earth years to worry much about it, but he wondered at the back of his mind whether this lot would be able to find their way home.

  Besides the officers, three crewmen sat at the workstations controlling the forward band of attitude jets. The Sultan had been stretched by two hull sections after her first decade of service as an intrasystem trader. That had required adding another band of jets.

  The new controls and the sprawl of conduits feeding them had been placed on the bridge. They made it difficult for a landsman like Gregg to walk there under normal 1-g acceleration without tripping or bruising himself against a hip-high projection. Now, with the flagship floating in orbit, Gregg had even worse problems. The spacers slid easily along.

  The most reassuring thing about the situation was the expression of utter boredom worn by every one of the crewmen on the control boards. They were experienced, and they saw no reason for concern.

  "Sir," said Ricimer, "I'll take the cutter down and find us a landing site. This is Salute. I've checked the star plots myself."

  "Can't be sure of a plot with these optics," Bivens muttered. "Maybe the Dove got a better sighting than I could."

  "I'll take the six men who came with me when I sold The Judge," Ricimer said brightly. "I'm pretty sure I've spotted two Southern compounds, and there are scores of Molt cities for sure."

  Ricimer was a short man, dark where Gregg was fair. Though willing to be critical, Gregg admitted that the spacer was good-looking, with regular features and a waist that nipped in beneath powerful shoulders. Ricimer wore a tunic of naturally red fibers from somewhere outside the solar system, and his large St. Christopher medal hung from a strand of glittering crystals that were more showy than valuable.

  "Might not even be Molts here if it isn't Salute," Bivens said. "Between the twenty-third and twenty-ninth transits, I think we went off track."

  Choransky turned, probably as much to get away from his navigator as for a positive purpose, and said, "All right, Ricimer, take the cutter down. But don't lose her, and don't con me into some needle farm that won't give me a hundred meters of smooth ground. The Sultan's no featherboat, remember."

  "Aye-aye, sir!" Ricimer said with another of his brilliant smiles.

  "I'd like to go down with the boat," Gregg said, as much to his own surprise as anyone else's.

  That drew the interest of the other men on the bridge, even the common sailors. Piet Ricimer's face went as blank as a bulkhead.

  Gregg anchored himself firmly to the underside of a workstation with his left hand. "I'm Stephen Gregg," he said. "I'm traveling as supercargo for my uncle, Gregg of Weyston."

  "I know that," Ricimer said, with no more expression in his voice than his face held.

  "Ah—Ricimer," Captain Choransky said nervously. "Factor Gregg is quite a major investor in this voyage."

  "I know that too," Ricimer said. His eyes continued to appraise Gregg. In a tone of challenge, he went on, "Can you handle a boat in an atmosphere, then, Gregg?"

  Gregg sniffed. "I can't handle a boat anywhere," he said flatly. "But I'm colonel of the Eryx battalion of the militia, and I'm as good a gunman as anybody aboard this ship."

  Ricimer's smile spread again. "Yeah," he said, "that might be useful."

  He reached out his hand to shake Gregg's. When he saw the landsman was afraid to seem awkward in reaching to take it, Ricimer slid closer. He moved as smoothly as a feather in the breeze. Ricimer's grip was firm, but he didn't make the mistake of trying to crush Gregg's hand to prove that he was as strong as the bigger man.

  "Maybe," Ricimer added over his shoulder as he led Gregg out through the bridge hatch, "we can give you some hands-on with the boat as well."

  2

  Above Salute

  "Tancred!" Ricimer shouted as he slid hand over hand past crewmen in the bay containing the other two sets of attitude-jet controls. "C'mon along. Leon, get Bailey and Dole from the main engine compartment. We're taking the cutter down!"

  "Bloody well about time!" agreed Leon. He was the Sultan's bosun, a burly, scarred man. Leon picked his way with practiced skill through a jungle of equipment and connectors toward a back passage to the fusion thrusters.

  "Lightbody and Jeude are already in Cargo Three with the boat," Ricimer said as he plunged headfirst down a ladderway toward the cargo holds.

  Gregg tried to go "down" feetfirst as he would on a ladder under gravity. The passage, looped with conduits, was too narrow for him to turn when he realized his mistake. Tancred, following Gregg the proper way, was scarcely a boy in age. His face bore a look of bored disgust as he waited for the landsman to kick his way clear of obstacles he couldn't see.

  Though the Sultan wasn't under thrust, scores of machines worked within the vessel's hull to keep her habitable. Echoes in the passage sighed like souls overwhelmed by misery.

  Three crewmen under Leon were readying the eight-meter cutter when Gregg reached the hold. Tancred dogged the hatch closed, then joined the others with a snorted comment that Gregg chose not to hear.

  Ricimer was at the arms locker, handing a cutting bar to a wiry spacer. "Here you go, Gregg," Ricimer called. The hold's empty volume blurred and thinned Ricimer's tones. "What do you want to carry?"

  Gregg looked over the selection. The bridge had a separate arms locker, but the larger cabinet was here in Cargo Three, whose outer hatch provided the Sultan's main access—except, presumably, when the hold was full of cargo.

  The locker held a dozen breech-loading rifles, each with a bag of ammunition sized to that weapon's chamber. Two of the rifles were repeaters, but those would be even more sensitive to ammo variations than the single-shots.

  True standardization had ended a millennium before, when hit-and-run attacks during the revolt of the outer colonies wrecked automated factories throughout the human universe. Billions of people died in the Collapse that followed.

  Humanity had recovered to a degree. Mass production was technically possible again. The horror of complex systems that could be destroyed by a shock—and bring down civilization with them—remained. It was as much a religious attitude as a practical one.

  Most of the locker was filled with powered cutting bars, forty or more of them. Venerian ceramic technology made their blades, super-hard teeth laminated in a resilient matrix, deadly even when the powerpack was exhausted and could not vibrate the cutting edge. Apart from thei
r use as weapons, the bars were useful tools when anything from steel to tree trunks had to be cut.

  There were also three flashguns in the locker. These had stubby barrels of black ceramic, thirty centimeters long and about twenty in diameter, mounted on shoulder stocks.

  Under the right circumstances, a flashgun's laser bolts were far more effective than shots from a projectile weapon. The flashgun drained its power at each bolt, but the battery in the butt could be replaced with reasonable ease. Under sunny conditions, a parasol accumulator deployed over the gunner's head would recharge the weapon in two or three minutes anyway, making it still handier.

  But flashguns were heavy, nearly useless in smoke or rain, and dangerous when the barrel cracked in use. The man carrying one was a target for every enemy within range, and side-scatter from the bolt was at best unpleasant to the shooter. They weren't popular weapons despite their undoubted efficiency.

  Gregg took a flashgun and a bandolier holding six spare batteries from the locker.

  Piet Ricimer raised an eyebrow. "I don't like to fool with flashguns unless I'm wearing a hard suit," he said.

  Gregg shrugged, aware that he'd impressed the sailor for the first time. "I don't think we'll run into anything requiring hard suits," he said. "Do you?"

  Ricimer shrugged in reply. "No, I don't suppose so," he said mildly.

  Carrying two single-shot rifles, Ricimer nodded the crewman holding another rifle and three cutting bars toward the boat. He followed, side by side with Gregg.

  "You owned your own ship?" Gregg asked, both from curiosity for the answer and to find a friendly topic. He didn't care to be on prickly terms with anybody else in the narrow confines of a starship.

  Ricimer smiled at the memory. "The Judge, yes," he said. "Captain Cooper, the man who trained me, willed her to me when he died without kin. Just a little intrasystem trader, but she taught me as much as the captain himself did. I wouldn't have sold her, except that I really wanted to see the stars."