Praise for David Gerrold
and The Star Wolf Series
“David Gerrold knows Star Trek better than anyone, and here’s his take at how it really should have been; the Star Wolf series is Star Trek done right—moral conundrums, fascinating characters, and pulse-pounding action. Highly recommended.”
—ROBERT J. SAWYER, author of Hominids
“. . . story moves along at the speed of light.”
—Publisher’s Weekly
“the adventure’s there, the action moves along nicely, and the villain is as nasty as anyone could wish.”
—Analog
“David Gerrold proves that he can do all the things that made us love Heinlein’s storytelling—and often better.”
—ORSON SCOTT CARD
“Gerrold elevates his story line above standard battle-driven fare by focusing on the intense war of wits between the Star Wolf’s fully dimensional human crew and its unique alien adversary. He produces intelligent and entertaining hard SF that remains blessedly free of the militaristic stereotypes rampant in other examples of the subgenre.”
—Booklist
“Halfway into the story, we’ll already know more about poor Commander Korie, and his whole accursed crew, and every compartment in their jinxed ship, than we ever learned about Kirk and the Enterprise in three seasons and several feature films. Equally important, that ship and those people will go somewhere, and be changed profoundly by what happens to them along the way.”
—SPIDER ROBINSON
THE
VOYAGE
OF THE
STAR WOLF
ALSO BY DAVID GERROLD
— FICTION —
The Star Wolf series
The Voyage of the Star Wolf
The Middle of Nowhere
Blood and Fire (January 2004)
The War Against the Chtorr series
The Dingilliad trilogy
The Man Who Folded Himself
The Flying Sorcerers (with Larry Niven)
When HARLIE Was One
Moonstar Odyssey
The Martian Child
— NONFICTION —
The World of Star Trek
The Trouble With Tribbles
Worlds of Wonder
DAVID GERROLD
THE
VOYAGE
OF THE
STAR WOLF
BENBELLA BOOKS
Dallas, Texas
This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are the product of the author’s imagination and are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales or persons, living or dead, is coincidental.
BenBella Books Edition
Copyright © 1990 by David Gerrold
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews.
BenBella Books
10300 N. Central Expressway, Suite 400, Dallas, Texas 75231
eISBN: 9781935251514
Send feedback to [email protected]
www.benbellabooks.com
First BenBella Printing: January 2004
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Gerrold, David, 1944–
The voyage of the Star Wolf / written by David Gerrold.
p. cm.
ISBN 978-1-9352-5151-4
1. Space ships—Fiction. I. Title.
PS3557.E69V695 2003
823'.914—dc22
2003015764
Cover illustration by Bob Eggleton
Cover design by Melody Cadungog
Interior designed and composed by John Reinhardt Book Design
Distributed by Independent Publishers Group
To order call (800) 888-4741
www.ipgbook.com
For Amy Stout,
with love
Contents
Introduction
The Silk Road Convoy
Marathon
Liberty Ships
The LS-1187
Recalled to Life
A Situation of Some Gravity
Korie’s Cabin
Eye in the Sky
The Morthan Solidarity
Harlie
The Scanning Lens
Return of the Dragon
Winged Beans
The Hole Thing
The Probe
Lord of the Dragons
Homeward
Stardock
In the Vice-admiral’s Office
Mail Call
The Crew
The Exorcism
The Captain’s Cabin
Chief of Security
Decisions
A Little History
The Inner Hull
Officers’ Country
Ship’s Mess
Subluminal
Superluminal
Quillas
A Good Idea at the Time
Rendezvous
The Burke
The Morthan Diplomatic Corps
Traps
Hard Decisions
High-cycle Fluctuators
The Shuttle Bay
Harder Decisions
Coffee
Provisions
Med Station
The Forward Observatories
Status Report
Signals
A Morthan Lullaby
The Operations Deck
Sick Bay
The Bridge
The Last Letter Home
The Lie
Introduction
Jerry Pournelle
If you didn’t know David Gerrold began his writing career as a script writer, you’ll know that before you finish The Voyage of the Star Wolf. Now, usually when a critic says that a book reads like a screen play that’s bad news, but not always, and not this time. What I mean is that this is a very visual book, with lots of images, and that’s all to the good. Space is a colorful place, but not many have been there, and even fewer have ever seen a space warship. You’ll know what David Gerrold’s spaceships look like well before you finish this book.
This is an action adventure space novel—what’s called in the trade “space opera” for reasons that have never been clear to me. They don’t call the C. S. Forester novels about the Napoleonic era age of sail “sea operas,” but this book and many other “space operas” draw heavily on that tradition. Space war is like naval war, so this is hardly surprising: many of the problems of modern warship commanders are not all that different from those faced by Horatio Hornblower, and most of us who think about warfare in the future suspect that future ship commanders will have more of the same problems. A ship is no better than its crew, and a crew is no better than its leadership.
There are two ways to write a “space opera.” One way is to just write it, and if you get into too deep a hole, go back and change the assumptions, play with the plot line, exercise author control, and with a mighty leap your hero gets past the trouble. That never makes for a very good story, and may explain where the term “space opera” comes from, and just why it’s such a term of derision. Alas, there were a lot of such stories written over the years.
The other way to write a space action adventure story is to take it seriously, with a full development of the background: physics, weapons, social structure, history, visualizations of the shipboard environment, and all the rest. Once you have that backstory, write your adventure in that world, and if you come to a problem, solve it without changing the rules. That’s the way Larry Niven and I did The Mote in God’s Eye—arguably the book that revived the space opera
after a long period in the doldrums—and that’s what David has done with Voyage of the Star Wolf. He took his subject seriously, and as a result he’s done a book that’s very readable. When I told my son Alex I was doing an introduction to this book, he said “Good choice. I’d rather read that again than another of the XXX YYY series.” [Story names of a popular series omitted for obvious reasons.] And of course Alex was right. Voyage of the Star Wolf reads fast enough that you’ll miss some details. The details are in there and they’re interesting too; which makes this a book you can read more than once, something I can’t say about a lot of space opera.
The backstory here is quite detailed and interesting all by itself, and quite self consistent; and inside that backstory there’s a real moral question of just what is human. Let me give you a mild example: suppose a couple genetically engineers their child, choosing genes that make their child a world class Marathon runner. She then goes out and beats the men’s world record and wins all her races. What are we to make of that? Is this acceptable? And what is she to think about herself? Now that incident isn’t in this book, but it might have happened in the Star Wolf’s world’s history, and the moral question is very much in the background here. Not that there’s a lot of moralizing, because this is, after all, an action adventure novel; but like the best of that genre, the story is informed, to use a modern phrase, by important questions, and that’s one of them.
It’s also a study in command, and once again, David Gerrold takes the subject seriously. He’s not preachy. He just looks at a real problem: How do you turn a jinx ship into a fighting unit? The answer to that question has often made a great story, and it does this time too. David has studied the master story tellers, Heinlein and Forrester and Conrad, and it shows.
So. We have real characters, which is to say they’re flawed as all real humans are, afraid when most heroic, as real humans are. We have a believable background. We have a war that makes as much sense as most wars do; and we have the epic voyage of a ship that earns her way into the fleet. Robert Heinlein used to say “We write for Joe’s beer money, and Joe likes his beer. It’s our obligation to give him at least as much fun from our books as he’d get from a six pack.” The Voyage of the Star Wolf more than meets that obligation. I enjoyed reading it again. If you’ve read this far, you’ll like it too.
Jerry Pournelle
Hollywood, June, 2003
Out there.
The eternal frontier.
It isn’t the darkness that gets to you and it isn’t the aloneness. It’s the emptiness. It’s the incomprehensible endless empty that drives you mad from the inside.
It presses upward from the back of your skull, it is a constant gnawing pressure, until you feel as if you are going to explode. You cannot taste it. You cannot touch it. But you can feel it constantly, so close—just on the other side of the bulkhead.
One day, you know that you’re going to open an airlock and step out to meet it face to face. You know that you’re going to do it, even though you also know that it will certainly kill you. But you will do it anyway. There is no choice in the matter. There is no whether or not. There is only when and how. Someday, you will not be able to stand the not-knowingness of it any longer, and you will step naked out of the airlock to meet this inexplicable thing that doesn’t exist and can’t be seen or smelled or touched: this existence that is the absolute lack of all existence.
This is the kernel where the madness starts, this is how it grows: in the knowledge that the unexplainable incomprehensible unknowable exists. It demands explanation, but the human mind is incapable of explaining this concept of existence without form or substance. It cannot imagine, it cannot comprehend, it cannot contain ideas which are larger than itself—and in the face of possibilities that are larger even than the concept of concept, the mind flounders at a perpetual loss; it cannot encompass.
The mind cannot understand emptiness nor can it contain infinity. Total emptiness. Total infinity. Neither can be conceptualized, neither can be held in the human consciousness. And when both of those staggering truths exist together—endless emptiness or empty endlessness—the mind founders on the reefs of confusion and desperation. The human spirit is staggered by the experience; stunned, horrified, entranced and transformed. It’s beautiful. It’s terrifying. It’s like looking into the face of God.
Afterward, you are not the same person.
The body, the expression, the total affect of the being is forever enchanted by the experience of space. The way you walk, the way you talk, the way you think and feel. No one who has ever stood naked before the jeweled night will ever be free of its terror and its power.
And even this is only an intimation of the magnificent dreadfulness of hyperstate.
—W. Ilma Meier, Death and Transformation in Space
The Silk Road Convoy
The Silk Road Convoy was almost three hundred years old.
Its path roughly described a bent and swollen, meandering, broken ellipse along the edge of the rift and then out and across it and back again. A closer examination might reveal that the trail of the convoy was actually a series of lesser arcs tracing through the spiral arm, then turning reluctantly out into the darkness of The Deep Rift, with one scheduled stopover at the forlorn worlds of Marathon, Ghastly, and George, then across The Great Leap and into the lips of the ghostly streamer known as The Purse on the opposite side, then around The Outbeyond, down toward The Silver Horn, and finally turning home again, leaping across at The Narrows and then down through The Valley of Death to The Heart of Darkness, then a sudden dogleg up to a place of desperate joy known as Last Chance, before finally sliding into The Long Ride Home and a golden world called Glory.
The Silk Road Convoy was the oldest of all the caravans on the route. It was not the largest fleet on the route, but it was definitely the richest and most prestigious.
The convoy followed the path of an ancient exploration vessel. Colonies had followed the vessel. Traders had followed the colonies. The trade had evolved over the centuries into a trade route called The Silk Road. Eventually, due to the twists and vagaries of luck and history and fate, it became one of the most profitable routes known in the Alliance. At any given moment there might be as many as thirty different caravans scattered along its great curving length—but only the original Silk Road Convoy was entitled to bear the name of the trade route. This was because the partnership which had grown up with the original Silk Road Convoy also owned or controlled most of the directorships of the Silk Road Authority.
The Silk Road Authority was larger than most governments. It held three seats in the Alliance and controlled almost all of the trade, both legal and otherwise, within the ellipse of its influence. The Authority had major offices on every planet within thirty light-years of the primary route. Every merchant ship in the arm paid a license fee for the privilege of traveling the route and booking passengers and cargo through the offices of the Authority.
Some ships, like the notorious freebooter Eye of Argon, preferred to travel alone. Others paid for the privilege of traveling with a caravan. The caravans were near-permanent institutions.
Imagine a chain of vessels nearly three light-days long, islands of light strung through the darkness. They carried names like The Emerald Colony Traders (licensed to The Silk Road) and The Great Rift Corporation (licensed to The Silk Road) and Zetex Starlines (licensed to The Silk Road). The caravans provided service and safety—and safety had lately become a primary consideration for star travelers.
Because of its name, because of its age and its prestige, the Silk Road Convoy was considered the safest of all.
Marathon
The dark world of Marathon had never known life of its own and never would. Lost in eternal night, it circled a dead and cold star. Ghostly starlight limned its bleak horizons. Life here could never be more than a lonely visitor. The planet was hard and barren and ugly.
It had been discovered by accident, settled by necessity. The only good
thing about Marathon was its location, a third of the way into The Deep Rift. Hard in the abyss; the ugly world was a welcome way station in the long desperate leap to the other side. Its single settlement was a bright lonely point of life. Despite itself, despite its abysmal desolation, Marathon had become an important stopover. It was a nexus of the lesser trade routes which bordered the abyss; despite its desolate loneliness, the dark world was becoming a trade center in its own right.
Marathon had two neighbors, Ghastly and George, both of which were said to be considerably less attractive than Marathon. Few had gone to see for themselves. There was some ice mining on George, and nothing on Ghastly but a few crashed probes.
Marathon wasn’t quite the frontier, but it was an edge and that was bad enough. Too many things lurked out here.
And too many people had become suddenly afraid.
Despite the patrol vessels, the growing fears of war were making Marathon a place of urgency and need. There was an air of panic here. The sudden flow of refugees from The Outbeyond had created a thriving market for passage on every stopping vessel, regardless of destination, as long as it was deeper away from the frontier. The local offices of The Silk Road Authority had become hard pressed to meet the growing demand for passage.
Adding to the distress of the refugees was the fact that a great number of ships were waiting stubbornly in orbit around Marathon, their captains refusing to continue along the route until they could join The Silk Road Convoy.
If it came.
Rumor had it that war between the Alliance and the Solidarity was imminent. Rumor had it that the Silk Road Authority was so concerned about the inevitability of interstellar conflagration that the great caravan might not pass this way again for a long long time. Rumor had it that this was the caravan’s last circuit, that the route was being shut down for fear of Morthan marauders.
The Voyage of the Star Wolf Page 1