“I expected you would take your swords out of your scabbards before striking with them! And use the sharp ends of your spears!”
“Then perhaps you should have so specified in your orders,” Arden said, smiling faintly. Behind him were snickers. No doubt everyone in Manjeuk had been confused to have the fiercest riders of the South gallop through, swatting and poking them with scabbarded swords. No doubt they were all bruised and broken from it. But none had been stabbed or cut. The orders had not specified that. And had specified the mercenaries were not to think too hard.
“Because of your cowardice,” Shakis said, and Balyat and Ty’kara growled with flinty gazes. Arden laid out a palm to hold them. It was all he needed to command them, despite the mortal insult. “Because of your cowardice, our men took near twenty deaths.”
“I lost a man, too,” Arden replied. “Bukli, my best messenger.”
“You have my pity, sell-sword,” Shakis replied. He was reaching a frothing level within, Arden could see. “No matter. The town was taken, and now our men show them what it means to lose.” The expression on his face was a combination of excitement and lust that was simply obscene.
It would have been better, Arden realized, to have killed the poor bastards quickly. He’d done them no favors as it was.
Timothy Zahn:
I didn’t set out to kill Joe Buckley. Frankly, I’d forgotten the man even existed.
But then I was reminded about him. I was reminded about how he hung around the edges of the Baen Multiverse. How he was always there, always lurking. A man who lived to die, or something like that.
I didn’t think much of it at the time. There are many characters out there, after all, who risk death on a daily basis simply by having the audacity to take up residence inside a computer owned by Weber or Flint or Drake or Ringo. I had nothing against the man, nor did I have any plans to join in the mass slaughter.
But the Cobras of Caelian were at war. And in war people die, even Cobras. One of them died right in front of me, in the scene below.
And to my surprise, when I turned him over, I saw that it was none other than Joe Buckley.
I still don’t know how that happened.
Cobra Guardian
TIMOTHY ZAHN
The Cobras were still firing when the Trofts finally replied.
The answering fire came in a single, massive salvo that flashed across the open air as abruptly as the Cobras’ own fire had begun, and suddenly the forest was filled with the stuttering crackle of blasted tree trunks and the secondary sizzle as hundreds of splinters and wood fragments rained down through the leaves around them. Both barrages ended, and for a pair of heartbeats the forest was dark and silent once again.
And then, without warning, a single flash lit up the night sky.
Only this one wasn’t from the Cobras or the nearby Troft ship. This one came from the other Troft ship, the one a kilometer away to the south.
And it wasn’t splinters and burned wood that hit the ground this time. This time, it was a human body.
* * *
His name, Jody learned, had been Buckley.
No one said much as two of the Cobras moved the badly burned body deeper into the forest, away from the Troft ship, and wrapped it in one of the silliweave shelters. Matigo muttered something over and over under his breath as they worked, but whether it was a prayer or a curse Jody couldn’t tell. Nor did she feel any inclination to ask.
Harli didn’t say any more than any of the others. But the glimpses of his face that Jody caught in the reflected light of the group’s sporadic but never-ending antipredator fire sent shivers up her back.
Finally, with the body as protected from scavengers as they could make it, Harli called the group together. “All right,” he said, his voice glacially calm. “Either the old legends were wrong about the Trofts not engaging in unnecessary killing, or else this bunch doesn’t play by those rules. So be it. They’ve made their point. Our next attack will just have to be clever.”
* * *
Uy’s throat tightened. “We were afraid that if we waited until they’d settled in and disembarked their troops it would put the civilians in greater danger than if we attacked before that happened. So we did. The Cobras targeted those little wings where most of the weapons seemed to be clustered and opened fire.”
Jody winced. “Only even Cobra antiarmor lasers didn’t do any good against them.”
“No, they didn’t,” Uy said, his voice going bitter. “And then they fired back. We lost eighteen Cobras in that first salvo.”
“Sending a message,” Freylan murmured, his voice thoughtful. “The way they did last night.”
Uy looked sharply at him, but Jody lifted a calming hand. It wasn’t like the Trofts listening in didn’t know all about last night’s events, after all.
As Uy himself also quickly realized. “Yes, I woke up in time to catch the end of that show,” he said. He hesitated, and Jody saw him brace himself. “You said they sent the same kind of message?”
“Their return fire killed a Cobra named Buckley,” Jody said. “I think he was the only one.”
“Buckley,” Uy mused, and she saw him relax fractionally at the news that the Troft’s violent response hadn’t taken his own son. “Inevitable, I suppose, that it was him. You didn’t know the man, but Joe was one of those who courted death on nearly a daily basis, yet always came cheerfully back for more.”
“I’m sorry,” Jody said, quietly. “So that brings the total to sixteen?”
“Oh, it brings it much higher than that,” Uy said sourly. “We’d learned our lesson on that one, all right, but the day’s seminars were hardly over. A few minutes after we gave up our assault, a ramp lowered from partway up the bow of each of the ships and a half dozen floatcycles came buzzing out and headed over the wall to-ward the gate. We took out three of them before the ship’s lasers opened fire again. We lost five more on that one.”
Tedd Roberts:
“Sarah’s Diner” is the gathering place in Baen’s Bar and Facebook for author Sarah Hoyt’s fans and some of the fledgling writers whom she has fostered. We discuss books, story ideas and puns, and even engage in interactive, collaborative round-robins where many participants create stories a few sentences or paragraphs at a time—often with hilarious results. Mostly though, I think Sarah keeps us around to distract and entertain her during those times when her subconscious needs to work out story details and sends her conscious mind out to play. It’s either that or sending in the dancing . . . (ahem) . . . rodents, so we the few, the proud, the Hoyt’s Huns do her bidding and entertain on command.
In November of 2013 it had already turned cold, and Sarah’s mind had stopped working, so about a dozen of the Huns were comparing various Baen writers and their preferences for cold vs. hot writing weather. In the Diner, as with any Baen-associated group, topic drift is a feature, not a bug, and the topic soon drifted to the Baen Barflies’ favorite victim, Joe Buckley. Someone mentioned a mental image of a child’s alphabet read-along book . . . and the Joe Buckley Alphabet was born.
The Joe Buckley Alphabet
SARAH HOYT’S DINERZENS
A is for Ablative, which Joe Buckley is not,
B is for Bazooka, for turning Buckley into snot,
C is for Chewed, for when Buckley forgot,
D is for Dead, for which he is (a lot).
E is for Eviscerate; it turned Joe to goo.
F is for Flattened, which happened to him, too.
G is for Goo (see entry F),
H is for H bomb, not much of Joe left . . .
I is for Icy, for that time Joe died in space,
J is for Jumpy; wouldn’t you be, in his place?
K is for the Kill, of which the author thought;
L is for Lives, of which Joe has a lot.
M is for Messy, like that one time he fried,
N is for Never . . . have the readers cried.
O is for Orbit, a cold, boil-y end,
Q is for Quit, which a Buckley never does,
R is for Red, the color of Buckley’s blood!
S is for Sh*t, which he drowned in once (gag!)
T is for Toasted, should’a zigged, but went zag,
U is for Ugly, for the messes Joe gets in,
V is for Victory, which Joe never lives to win.
W is for Werewolf, but he still ends up dead,
X is the target area, painted on his head.
Y looks like the slingshot, which has not killed him yet;
Z is for Zombies, by which Joe will be e’t.
The Twelve Days of Battle
(Sung to the the tune of “The Twelve Days of Christmas”)
On the Twelfth Day of Battle, my Buckley said to me,
Twelve Bombs are Falling;
It’s Not a Near Miss!!
We’re almost out of ammo!!
I’ve got a bad feeling;
Here’s a list of threats;
Incoming C-Dec;
The Sewage pipes are spraying;
John Ringo, NOOO!!!
Don’t turn me off;
This is gonna hurt!
That snow-blower smarts!
And we’re dead mo-ost def-in-ite-ly!!
Contributors are James Copley (Resoldier), Keith Glass, Tedd SpeakertoLabanimals Roberts, Brad Handley, Bruce Charles Hobbs, Richard Evans, and Sanford Begley.
About “The Anatomy Lesson” Cover
TOM KIDD
This was a highly collaborative cover. Jim Baen and all the authors were involved in one way or another. It started with Jim, it was his idea, and one for me to resolve. Earlier today I took the time today to read over the voluminous email exchanges.
Using long-distance models would require some careful instructions to my models (authors), and they rallied to help me.
As I remember, I argued that I should be the cadaver, an argument I lost. Jim even suggested he be the corpse but, ultimately, it was decided the body would be Joe Buckley’s. There’s a lot of modeling skill required to be a dead person so this worried me. Could Joe pull it off??? Yes, he could successfully lay still to have his picture taken. He even had slightly different angles taken and that helped me greatly.
The central figure of the doctor doing the dissection was a specific person too, Olga, a friend of Jim’s. I too wanted to be part of this scholarly group so I jammed myself in. Hint, I’m the guy with the paint brushes and palette. Oh, one other fun fact, that’s my wife Andrea on the left.
The Dead Man Speaks
JOE BUCKLEY
Back in the ’98-’99 timeframe, I wrote a couple of small Visual BASIC applications for my own entertainment—a date converter and an intercept calculator for use with David Weber’s Honor Harrington series. David was nice enough to give me input on how they should work and I gave him copies of the programs. Later, just after I started my website (thefifthimperium.com), when Ashes of Victory was in the early days of being snippeted, I got an email from David with the most lovely attachment: a copy of the manuscript for Ashes of Victory with the notation that he’d named a character after me. Of course, my character had zero lines of dialog, that rat!
I continued collecting the snippets, because I didn’t want anyone to know that I had a copy so early.
It was this first exposure to an early draft which led me to appreciate how a book develops: how scenes and “color” detail get added to more fully realize the story.
As to the whole story about being involved with David in a game or tournament of cutthroat spades, I had nothing to do with that. The rest of the unfortunate crew of HMLAC Cutthroat, now, they were pretty much the target of David’s literary wrath. It seems that David then decided that this was a golden opportunity to add my name to the casualty list! (As I usually tell the story, David killed off the rest of the crew of Cutthroat just to get at me.)
At about this same time, I was also conversing with Baen’s newest author, John Ringo.
John offered to let me read the manuscripts for A Hymn Before Battle and its sequel, Gust Front. A Hymn Before Battle was well on its way to publication and Gust Front was in the early stages of the publishing pipeline.
What I then did was something that quickly developed into a habit: I would load the stories into my Rocket ebook reader and use its notation ability to point out typoes, continuity errors and general questions about some minor points I noticed.
I don’t recall ever giving him advice on how to write something, along the lines of “Gee . . . this scene would work so much better from the younger Billy-Bob’s perspective.” Mainly typoes and continuity errors with a small smattering of “What the heck is this supposed to mean, since you said that several chapters ago?”
John never asked me for it. I just thought it would make life a little bit easier on John and his proofreaders if he could hammer out the small stuff before he turned in the manuscript.
He never told me to stop, either.
So it became an automatic action on my part.
Then came John’s collaboration with David Weber on March Upcountry.
The first copy of that I ever saw was under five chapters after a late-night AIM chat on space warfare tactics (in reference to the early loss of the DeGlopper). We quickly got into the habit of John’s sending me the manuscript after he’d added a few more chapters to it.
I’d read and read and reread the same things from the beginning and do my notation bit. I figure that by the end, I’d read parts of the book close to twenty times.
Sensibly, John was adding new material to the book and not bothering to go back and correct the small-fry issues that I kept pointing out to him.
Now, we have the book getting longer and longer and my list of questions, comments and typoes was getting longer each time.
By the time the story reached just past the point where John and David stopped the book (the first major event in what became March to the Sea), my list of uncorrected items was getting long.
It turns out that my Rocket eBook reader’s capacity for notations on a single title was only two hundred notes—I hit that before the end of the book! But I soon discovered that while the number of notes had a fixed limit, the number of items I could simply underline seemed to be effectively unlimited.
So the small-fry issues, like typoes, that are pretty obvious once pointed to, would get underlined, saving the limited notes for things that required some sort of questioning or explanation.
That week, John got a big list attached to his email. (To be fair, I trimmed it before sending, so I don’t believe the total of all points was over two hundred.) I heard later that John’s groan could be heard throughout the house. “What’d Joe do this time?” was how I heard the reaction to the groan phrased.
John saw the list. Got annoyed (honestly, we never really talked about it, but I think it was more in amusement, than anger), decided that Something Must Be Done and fired up his word processor and changed the name of the character “Peterson” in Gust Front (the unnamed “Lefty” in A Hymn Before Battle) to “Buckley.”
People took notice of how “Lefty’s Bad Day” in A Hymn Before Battle got so much worse in Gust Front and decided that I must have done something really horrible to John to deserve that sort of treatment.
People were also greatly amused with the whole concept.
Things really went off the rails with 1634: The Galileo Affair by Eric Flint and Andrew Dennis. I remember Eric dropping broad hints that something was in store for “me” in the story. He was actually rubbing his hands with glee and cackling like some B-movie, moustache-twirling villain as he dropped his hints.
At that point, the meme had taken on a life of its own.
So . . . that’s my story, and I’m sticking to it.
David Weber did it first. John Ringo industrialized it.
About our charities
All proceeds from this collection will support two charities nea
r and dear to our hearts, both founded, supported, and run by Baen readers: Operation Baen Bulk and ReadAssist.
Welcome to Operation Baen Bulk
Operation Baen Bulk started in the fall of 2009, when one of our founders got a ninety-day layoff notice, and moved into the Layoff Pool. With nothing to keep him busy, he corresponded with a few deployed GIs (who were also members of the Baen’s Bar community) and noticed that while they had individual requests, there were a number of things they mentioned their entire outfit needed or wanted. And he needed a project to keep him sane while looking for a job with the economy going south. And thus was OBB born: a bunch of SF fans, all of whom read the military SF that Baen Books published, pooled our money and resources to insure that a training detachment in Afghanistan could have some personal hygiene products, Christmas trees and good coffee. The project kept our cofounder busy and productive until he found a better job. Along the way, he roped in a good friend and college classmate, who had also been active in sending supply items to the troops.
Along the way, we’ve provided for the oddball requests and creature comfort needs of several deployed units—snacks, books, flashlights, batteries, unbreakable coffee mugs, socks, sundries and BOOKS! We’ve even had military assistance at getting those supplies sent overseas. As the Afghanistan and Iraq deployments wound down, OBB turned our attention to helping injured troops by purchasing over eighty Kindle eBook readers, and loading them with over five hundred free and donated titles from Baen and other authors. We sent those Kindles to military treatment facilities and recovery centers around the country to provide reading enjoyment to troops recovering from deployment-related injuries.
But we couldn’t have done it without you. We all appreciate your contributions and the assistance of Baen Books. Thank you for your support.
—Rob Hampson and Keith Glass,
The Many Deaths of Joe Buckley Page 10