by Baen Books
She still didn’t know Theisman very well. For that matter, she still wasn’t positive he’d meant it when he insisted the head of the provisionally restored Republic of Haven had to be a civilian. To be fair, he hadn’t showed a single sign that he didn’t mean it, and Javier and Lester Tourville both spoke of him in glowing terms. So did Kevin Usher, which counted—counted for a lot—with Eloise Pritchart, and he certainly seemed sincere. But she’d seen too much “sincerity” over the years, and it was her job to be suspicious. Haven had staggered from façade democracy, to totalitarianism, to a dictatorship that was still worse for far too long. She’d lost a beloved sister, more friends than she could count, and too many pieces of her own soul fighting that process.
It would end. It would end now, with her. With Thomas Theisman, too, if he was serious, but it would end, whatever it cost and whatever it took.
“I’m not trying to make it ‘better,’ Madame President,” the Chief of Naval Operations and Pritchart’s Secretary of War replied, meeting her cold eyes. “I’m trying to explain it.”
“And to justify going right on doing it.”
Pritchart’s voice was even colder than her eyes, and Theisman’s nostrils flared ever so slightly. He started a quick reply, but stopped himself. Then he nodded.
“For certain values of ‘going on doing it,’ that’s exactly what I’m suggesting, Madame President,” he said very levelly. “I fully agree that the way in which Harris and Public Safety went about doing it was reprehensible. Unfortunately, I can’t shoot Saint-Just all over again for it.” Something that could have been anger flashed in Pritchart’s eyes as he reminded her who’d actually accomplished the Committee of Public Safety’s overthrow ten T-months before. “Nor does the fact that their decision about these people’s fundamental rights was as immoral as everything else they did mean we don’t need the star system’s capabilities. Or that we don’t need to keep its very existence as dark as we possibly can for as long as we possibly can. I don’t like it, either, Madame President, but it’s part of my job to tell you things like that.”
It was Pritchart’s turn to pause before she fired back. She gazed up into the face of the taller Theisman for a long, taut moment, then gave him the grudging nod his honesty and forthrightness deserved. One thing she had discovered about Theisman was his total lack of patience with the carefully phrased, easily disavowed, cover-your-ass sort of policy recommendations which had become the norm under the Committee of Public Safety. When he sent her a memo, she could at least be certain it said what he truly thought, set forth in clear and logical progression, without obfuscation. She might not agree with it, but she never had to wonder if he’d told her the truth as he saw it and given her his very best advice based upon it.
“Believe me, Admiral,” she said finally, “I understand the basis for your argument. And if Wilhelm and Kevin are right about High Ridge, your points are even stronger . . . from a military and pragmatic perspective. It’s the morality that bothers me. Expediency is a slippery slope. Rob Pierre discovered that.”
She sighed and looked back at the visual display.
“I knew him before the coup,” she went on in a softer tone, almost as if she were speaking only to herself. “I know the Committee of Public Safety turned into something he’d never envisioned, never wanted, when he started, and he changed in the process, too. I don’t want to go down that same slope. I won’t.”
“With all due respect, Madame President, you’re not Rob Pierre and I’m not Oscar Saint-Just.” Her eyes came back to him, and he shrugged. “Well, you’re not Pierre, and I’m pretty sure I’m not Saint-Just. The fact that my proposal disturbs you so deeply pretty much proves that in your case. The fact that I’ve made it does seem to indicate the jury may still be out in mine, I suppose. But while I don’t think I’m another Saint-Just waiting to happen, there is one thing I have in common with him.”
“And what might that be, Admiral?” Pritchart asked warily, and he smiled ever so slightly.
“Oscar Saint-Just was a sociopath, which I don’t think I am,” he told her. “But he was a very loyal sociopath. Rob Pierre was Chairman of the Committee of Public Safety, and even when Saint-Just disagreed with him, he never forgot who was Chairman and who wasn’t. I may disagree with you upon occasion, but I’ve got a pretty good memory, too.” He shrugged again. “Madame President, you’re President of the Republic of Haven . . . and I’m not.”
She looked at him for another long moment, then nodded slightly.
“Point taken, Admiral,” she said. “Point taken.”
•IV•
So darkness fell.
So safety died.
So ruin came,
And Refuge set
In blood above Despair
—The Dark Fall Saga
* * * * * * * * * *
Landing Valley
Planet Sanctuary
Refuge System
March 1916 Post Diaspora
The shuttle banked gracefully, standing on its port wing tip, and Eloise Pritchart gazed down at a mountain valley. It was a shallow valley, except where the river had cut a path down its center. There the almost flat valley floor plunged for over thirty meters, suddenly and steeply, to the level of the stream.
Thin plumes of steam rose from the jagged, truncated summits of two mountains at the northern end of the valley. A lake filled the bottom of the yawning caldera where a third, even larger mountain had once stood on its eastern rim, and she shivered inside as her eyes traced the tortured, frozen lava field stretching down from it into the valley’s heart. The volcanologists the PRH had exported to the planet all agreed no fresh eruption was imminent, but they also agreed there’d been at least six of them over the past twelve or thirteen centuries.
As the shuttle swept lower, she saw the shadows of the excavations along the eastern bank of the Despair River, between the stream and the caldera, and that inner shiver turned into an arctic chill. The archaeologists working the site didn’t even look up as her shuttle passed overhead. Their attention was on something that had happened long, long ago.
On the reason that river was called Despair.
“God, what must it have been like?” she wondered out loud.
“I doubt anyone who wasn’t here could even imagine,” Theisman said softly from the seat beside hers. “And, frankly, I’m glad I can’t.”
“I think I agree with you.” Pritchart leaned her forehead against the viewport, gazing aft to keep the excavations in sight as the shuttle’s flight path straightened and it began to climb once more. They were still a thirty-minute flight from Mountain Fort, the planetary capital. Or administrative center, at least. But as sobering as she’d found the overflight, she’d insisted on making it before they landed.
“I think I agree,” she repeated, sitting back in her seat. “Especially if Baranav was right when he dated Anderson.” She shook her head. “How could anyone find the will to go on after two disasters like that?”
“We’ll never know,” Theisman replied. “Not for sure. But I think Anderson probably got it pretty close to right. Parents don’t lie down and die when their kids’ lives are on the line. And most of the people with any quit in them were probably dead even before it happened, given everything they’d already been through. They had to’ve been tougher than nails to get as far as Sanctuary in the first place.”
Pritchart nodded soberly as her mind ran back over the incredible cascade of coincidences, unlikelihoods, and outright impossible accomplishments that had brought her and Theisman to this planet at this moment.
From their perspective, that cascade began only forty T-years ago, when Admiral Laforge had handed the assignment to find a use for the Calvin Terminus off to one of her underlings with instructions to Do Something and keep the damned politicians off her back.
The “something” turned out to be a follow-up expedition charged with evaluating the system’s possible military utility and what it would take to capitalize u
pon it. Everyone involved had understood it was basically make work to keep the politicians happy, but they’d been told to spend long enough to make it look good and to produce a comprehensive report demonstrating how earnestly the Navy had complied with its orders. In the event, Captain Braun the expedition’s commander had decided that since the Calvin itself was obviously unsuitable as a site for any planetary installations, to survey the closest half-dozen or so neighboring star systems for possible alternate bases.
One of those star systems had been KCR-126-06, a multiple-star system consisting of KCR-125-06-A, an A-class giant with no less than three companions: two red dwarfs—KCR-125-06-B and KCR-125-06-C—in relatively tight orbits and a distant, almost equally dim K8, which had apparently been captured only a few hundred million years ago. The likelihood of a habitable world in a system like that was minute, given what was likely to happen to any planetary orbits. For that matter, A-class stars didn’t produce many planets in the first place, and they usually didn’t last long enough for any planets they did form to evolve into something suitable to maintain complex life forms. Even if that hadn’t been true, the red dwarfs were close enough to have precluded any planet formation in KCR-125-06-A’s liquid-water zone.
Not only that, KCR-126-06 had actually been looked at—sort of—by astronomers over a thousand T-years ago. There wasn’t much to see—the giant and its red dwarf companions had no planets at all, and KCR-125-06-D was so close to a red dwarf itself that the chance of a planet in its liquid-water zone not being tide-locked to it was unlikely in the extreme. In addition, the K8 star was surrounded by an extraordinarily dense interplanetary dust cloud. That cloud had precluded any close look at the inner system, and coupled with the rest of the entire KCR-125-06 System’s unprepossessing astrography and the general lack of worthwhile real estate in the region, no one had seen any reason to look any closer. The chance that there might, possibly, be a marginally habitable planet hidden inside all that dust did, however exist—theoretically, at least—and looking for one should certainly convince the Navy’s political masters of how thoroughly it had applied itself to carrying out its vital mission.
What Braun had never even imagined he might discover in the process was the answer to what had become of Calvin’s Hope.
No one knew how she’d come to her final resting place, 9.7 LY from her original destination, in the L5 Lagrange point between the second planet of KCR-126-06-D and its very large, solitary moon, but they did know it must have been the stuff of legends.
It was amazing enough that Calvin’s Hope still existed, but she was only a bare hull, stripped to the bone by her passengers and crew before they’d left her forever for the planet they’d named Sanctuary. Not even the Legislaturalists had been prepared to disturb—desecrate—her after all these centuries, and the subsequent development of Sanctuary’s orbital industry had been kept scrupulously clear of her final resting place.
How she’d crossed the almost ten light-years from her original destination to the feeble warmth of the K8v star her passengers had renamed Refuge was one of the things no one would ever know, however. Simply finding Sanctuary in Refuge’s narrow habitable zone in a system where interplanetary dust was so dense even ships with military-great particle screening dared not attain velocities much in excess of 0.5 cee must have been a monumental task—after all, no one else had found it since, although, to be fair, no one had looked all that closely with so much other, more desirable stellar real estate available to anyone with a hyper-generator. But the KCR-126-06 System had been the only haven the Calvin Expedition could possibly have reached before their vessel’s internal systems failed.
Calvin’s Hope’s specifications were readily available, given that it was one of the most famous Dutchmen in galactic history. And from those specifications, she couldn’t possibly have had more than a century or so of reserve endurance. With that limitation, she couldn’t have accelerated to her designed cruising velocity and stayed there long enough for her scoop field to replenish her reaction mass. That limited her to a maximum velocity of no more than ten percent of light-speed, if she meant to decelerate at the end of her voyage.
And KCR-126-0 6 was the only star system which lay within less than a century’s travel—at 0.1 cee—of Calvin’s Star.
That meant they’d had no choice but to look at it far more closely than any less desperate astronomer ever had since. And then—somehow—they’d had to actually make the ninety-eight-year voyage. The story of how they’d done that must have been in Calvin’s Hope’s computers once upon a time, but her computer cores had been stripped along with everything else that could possibly be taken down to Sanctuary, and so no one would ever be able to celebrate her epic achievement as it properly deserved.
Yet she’d done her job. Somehow, she’d gotten her people to a new home after all. She delivered her cargo of fragile human beings to a habitable planet—quite a lovely one, actually—despite the fact that it really shouldn’t have existed and that she’d never been intended for the additional voyage, and the colonists must have heaved an enormous sigh of relief.
But the universe hadn’t been finished with the Calvin Expedition just yet.
There was no written history of the colony’s earliest days, either. None of the official histories other colonies maintained. Not even a single diary.
What there was was only a heroic saga, Dark Fall, attributed to the semi-mythical bard Anderson, the Sanctuarian Homer. Sanctuarian historians believed Dark Fall had probably been composed within a hundred local years after landing, because its earliest known manuscript version was in still recognizable Standard English, and Standard English had been a dead language on Sanctuary for over a thousand T-years. Later written versions had also been found, in at least three of Sanctuary’s indigenous ancient languages, although with significant variations. Clearly it had been passed on in a purely oral tradition during the colonists’ long, desperate struggle to survive after the events it described.
Sanctuary had lost its entire pre-colonization history during that struggle. It had lost even basic literacy and evolved its own mythic interpretations of how humankind had come to exist. When literacy reemerged, it was in entirely different languages, and in the wake of their own belated Scientific Revolution, Sanctuarian scholars had put Dark Fall into the same category as all the other obviously fanciful creation myths.
Until the Standard English manuscript was discovered. It wasn’t complete—at least a dozen stanzas were missing—but the Sanctuarian languages retained enough loan words from Standard English for those scholars to make at least a partial translation of it and realize what it purported to be. Despite its obvious antiquity, the majority of those scholars had continued to consider the entire saga and all the nightmare events it described a pure work of fiction. But not all of them had concurred, and the historian Baranav had become the Sanctuarian Schliemann when he decided to take Anderson at his word, despite the mockery that evoked from the majority of his colleagues.
The mockery which had ended abruptly when his research and excavations located the mythological city of Home on the banks of the Despair River and confirmed the saga’s fundamental accuracy. And confirmed the reason why, according to Anderson, that river had been renamed.
According to Dark Fall, the colonists’ chosen site for the enclave they’d named simply Home had been in a fertile, sheltered mountain valley well-watered by the glacier-fed river they’d named Hope. After the ordeal of finding a habitable planet in the first place, Landing Valley had seemed a paradise. But no one had suspected how tectonically active the mountains around Home were. Not until sometime shortly after the last shuttle had made its final trip into space and returned, when a mountain above Landing Valley had exploded in an eruption that had dwarfed that of Old Terra’s Vesuvius in 2024 PD. It had been followed by a series of seismic shocks which had gone on for days or weeks—or even months. Dark Fall claimed they’d lasted for an entire year, but surely that had to be an exaggera
tion!
Or possibly not.
Baranav’s excavations had conclusively demonstrated that there’d been multiple eruptions over the centuries since the one Sanctuary’s geologists had labeled the Dark Fall Eruption, but the one which had overwhelmed Home had apparently been both the first and the worst. However long it had lasted, the disaster had been more than sufficient to bury the enclave under forty meters of pyroclastic flow and mud.
Anderson claimed that well over half of Home’s inhabitants had died in that dreadful eruption, and the remainder had been left with only scraps of technology as they faced the task of somehow surviving on their alien homeworld.
Eloise Pritchart had no idea how they’d done it, but they had. Yet if humanity had survived on Sanctuary, it had done so only after a struggle at least as terrible as that of any planet its species had ever settled. Unlike a planet like Grayson, Sanctuary didn’t try to kill them every single day. Indeed, aside from the Dark Fall Eruption, it had hardly tried to kill them at all. But Dark Fall had almost been enough by itself. Though the Sanctuarians might have survived it, they’d lost not only all advanced technology but all true memory of who they were or how they’d come to the world upon which they lived.
By the time the People’s Republic discovered the KCR-126-04 Terminus, Sanctuary had just finished reinventing the telegraph, discovered the germ theory of disease, and begun the transition from waterpower to steam. The planetary population had increased to almost two billion, because aside from its volcanism—which was, admittedly, more pronounced than on all but a handful of other inhabited worlds—Sanctuary’s environment was extraordinarily benign. The planet was a bit on the cool side, but it had very little axial tilt, which gave it extremely mild seasons, and even they were moderated by the fact that eighty-three percent of its surface was water. The original colonists had been selected in no small part to provide as diverse a genetic cross section as possible, which must have given it some cushion against disease, despite how savagely it had been winnowed, and human biochemistry was resistant to almost all of Sanctuary’s native diseases and parasites.