Onward, Drake! - eARC

by Mark L. Van Name

  At my request, he provided this afterword.

  When I first came to work at the Baen office as an editor, I learned that David Drake, whom I hadn’t yet encountered, had something of a reputation for being, well, prickly. He was said to be particularly annoyed by overly enthusiastic editors. When he found an editorial change in his work that he felt was unwarranted, Dave let his displeasure be known. Vociferously.

  So when Toni Weisskopf, the publisher of Baen, asked me if I wanted to coauthor a book with David Drake, I answered with some trepidation in my heart (or maybe in my gut)—but I also immediately answered, “Hell, yes.”

  I hadn’t met him, but I had read him—and I liked his work a great deal.

  He was a damn good storyteller.

  There was an old outline in the files for another book in the General series, a series that had begun with S.M. Stirling writing five books using Drake outlines, and then, when Stirling moved on to other projects, with Eric Flint writing two more books. Eric also moved on to other endeavors—most notably his very successful Ring of Fire alternate history series.

  The detailed origin of the General series can be found elsewhere, but the short version is that Jim Baen came up with the idea, and had his best friend and trusted author, David Drake, write up outlines for a series. These outlines were not short, three-page deals. No, each outline was quite detailed, and filled with suggestive opportunities for subplots and characters. The outline I used was about fifteen thousand words long. In the end, I couldn’t hold it to just one book, but had to make two out of it. These were the General series books The Heretic and The Savior.

  I wrote The Heretic without meeting or consulting with David Drake once. All I knew was that he’d okayed me with Toni Weisskopf. When I turned in my draft of the book, I metaphorically held my breath.

  Okay, I literally held my breath several times when I checked email to see if Dave had responded.

  Dave got back within a few days. I’d expected weeks of anxious waiting.

  “This is fine; I will put my name on it,” was the upshot of his comments. There were a few notes, easy to incorporate, and that was it. I spoke with Toni Weisskopf about Dave’s response.

  “I guess he was good with the book,” I said. “I hope he wasn’t gritting his teeth when he approved it.”

  Toni laughed. “You don’t understand. I’ve seen some of the responses Dave can give and has given. Dave liked it.”

  Months passed as the book was prepared for publication. During that time, I saw Dave from afar at a couple of conventions, once when he was going out to lunch with another author hero of mine, Gene Wolfe. But, even though I’d long overcome the writer’s introversion that afflicted my early years, I felt shy. This was a guy whose ideas I’d lived with for months and months, and had tried to translate into as good a story as I could tell.

  What if he didn’t like me?

  Then we were placed on the same panel at a convention and Dave and I finally met. It was pretty anticlimactic. During the course of the panel, he mentioned that The Heretic was coming out and that “I put my name on it. I didn’t have to put my name on it. I have that written into the contract. So if I put my name on it, that means I approved of it. Very much.” After the panel, Dave had to leave immediately for home, and I didn’t get a chance to talk to him further.

  When the book came out, we had a signing at a bookstore in Raleigh, North Carolina. Before the signing, we finally arranged to have dinner together. I brought my wife Rika; he brought his wife Jo.

  It went well.

  I had just read his novel Redliners, and we talked about that. I hadn’t known it, but the novel was one of Dave’s particular favorites among his books.

  Since we live relatively near one another in North Carolina, I invited Dave to be on the podcast I host, the Baen Free Radio Hour, several times. Often we would get a meal afterward.

  I didn’t for a minute believe I knew David Drake. Still don’t. But I was becoming familiar with him. To my surprise, I didn’t find him particularly prickly. What I did find was that he was a reservoir of great stories—and that he was a brilliant raconteur.

  There were stories about his early years, his tour in Vietnam, his law school days, his decision to transition to writing full-time, and the early days of Baen Books, where most of Dave’s books have been published. There were stories of his friendship with author Manley Wade Wellman, whose Silver John Appalachian fantasy stories I have admired since I’d read them as a teenager.

  Did I know that he was Wellman’s literary executor?

  I did not.

  Did I know he had written a novel as homage to Wellman and his influence?

  Nope. But I really wanted to read it.

  So I delved into the Baen archives and pulled Old Nathan from the shelf.

  I loved it. It quickly became my favorite Drake book of all.

  So when Mark Van Name asked me to write something for this collection, the first thing that popped into my head was to write an Old Nathan homage.

  An homage is not a pastiche. Dave had not copied Manly Wade Wellman when writing Old Nathan, and I could not and would not attempt to copy Dave. An author should not presume that he can copy someone who is very good, in any case. So I got to thinking about the characters, and the part of the Appalachians that I know best: the area where I grew up in Northeast Alabama. Ideas started to trickle in. But not yet a story.

  There is one thing about Dave’s physical presence that always strikes me when I see him. He is a thin and wiry guy, and his face might as well have belonged to a Roman senator—if faces have past lives. It is aquiline. His stare is eagle-like.

  He was profoundly affected by his time in Vietnam, for good and bad—for a while, very bad, as he’s said before—and this has influenced his life philosophy. Dave himself is open and amenable, yet his life philosophy—which Dave has no trouble articulating, let me tell you—is quite austere. When Dave smiles, he smiles warmly enough, but it seems to me a hint of the stoic is always behind it, the indication that things could get worse and probably would at some point.

  I knew I didn’t want to write a character that was my conception of David Drake. That way lies madness. Yet, often actors will take an article of their character’s costuming or a prop and build their character and his motivations around that synecdotal symbol.

  When I sat down to write my story for this anthology, I did the same with that Drakean smile.

  I started with the smile and a story began to materialize around it, like the Cheshire cat’s body.

  The rolling foothills of the Appalachians in Alabama. A favorite uncle of mine.

  A dog-rescuing lady I happen to know quite well.

  Oh, and one other thing I did that was in conscious imitation of David Drake’s style, something found especially in his fantasy and horror stories.

  I showed the monster.

  There can be build-up, there can be suspense—

  But, in the end, you show the monster and let somebody try to kill it.

  They may not succeed, but let them at least try.

  It’s a story, goddamn it, not a psychological study or an exercise in world-building—although both of those usually need to be present within it.

  But it’s a story.

  Don’t mess around.

  Tell it.

  That is what I most like about Dave, and about Dave’s work.

  He does.

  Technical Advantage

  John Lambshead

  The jungle grew more tangled and warped the closer they got to the base as if nature itself abhorred the presence of The Enemy. Trees grew at strange angles as if unsure which way was up and their branches intertangled and drooped like a crowd of drunks clutching at each other in vain attempt for mutual stability.

  The Leader knew the dysfunction represented nothing more mysterious than the end product of decades of biological and chemical saturation, but emotional response always trumped intellectual comprehension so this
place reeked of evil.

  Others felt it too.

  The Fighters were quiet, even the teenage girls pushing the supply bicycles had fallen silent, green and amber gloom draining their bird-shrill voices like an anechoic chamber. Neither the Leader’s threats nor patriotic exhortations could shut them up for long but the jungle did the business.

  Not that it mattered overmuch. The Enemy had long since ceased to use sound or chemical sniffers to detect Fighters, such devices too easily fooled by simple remedies like recorders or bags of human waste hung in the trees.

  The girls gazed uneasily around, eyes flicking from side to side like animals being herded into an abattoir. One of them gave a little squeal, sounding dramatically loud. Her abandoned bike fell over with a clatter spilling garishly coloured cereal bars.

  A green lizard shuffled onto the trail, head probing towards the startled girl. A serrated tongue slid from a slit in the closed jaws, flickering as if tasting the air. Thin orange fluid leaked between metallic green scales leaving a sour spoor in the leaf litter.

  The reptile moved a step or two towards the girl with a stiff jerking gait like an old man with joints crippled by arthritis.

  The Leader was upon the beast in three swift paces. He swung the heavy machete in his hand through a long overhead arc that ended at the reptile’s neck. The crystal-sharp carbon blade sliced through bone and tissue as if it were nothing but straw.

  The animal’s head bounced among the detritus while its body twisted and rolled over, stumpy legs thrashing. Goblets of slimy blood flew through the air. Red pus stained the khaki blouse of the horrified girl.

  “Take it off,” The Leader said, studying her body through disinterested eyes.

  She hurried to comply. The Gods only knew what foul mutated diseases oozed through the lizard’s body fluids.

  “Careful, don’t let the muck touch your skin.”

  Underneath the girl wore a yellow singlet. The Leader examined her closely but there was no sign that the reptile’s blood had passed through the coarse weave of the girl’s battle blouse. The bare skin covering her pipe-thin arms was pale and clean.

  The girl would die or she would live; he was indifferent. At this stage in the operation it didn’t matter much one way or the other. One girl here or there was not important.

  They followed the trail without further incident until they came to the river that marked the border between theoretically neutral McInleyland and Enemy-occupied Tashow. It was little more than a large stream this far into the dry season so was barely waist deep.

  But they didn’t ford.

  Things lived in the water and the ones with teeth were the least dangerous. The microscopic stuff killed way more commonly and usually in ways that made being eaten alive seem tame. That wouldn’t normally have stopped a Fighter patrol but today they had more pressing reasons not to risk the water.

  The water reminded The Leader how desperately he wanted to bathe. His skin prickled and itched uncontrollably. He frowned and tried to ignore the sensation before it became unbearable.

  The Leader turned and pushed through the two-metre-high grass lining the riverbank using his machete to chop through the more tangled clumps. He experienced the strangest illusion, as if he had been shrunk by some nefarious Enemy high technology to the size of an ant striking out across a meadow. He shook off the mood with an almost physical effort. It was not like him to let his imagination take hold like that. A lifetime of conflict had taught him to deal only with the here and now. Fighters who didn’t grasp this simple truth tended not to have an extended future.

  The grass thickened, slowing the column’s progress to a crawl even though he rotated the point man at regular intervals, but fortunately they didn’t have far to go. A hundred metres or so upstream a pioneer unit had arranged for a tree to fall across the river in a way that looked natural to an overhead observation ‘koid.

  The pioneers had cut a tunnel through the grass to the makeshift bridge to conceal their presence while they worked. The Leader had half-hoped it might still be there but the vegetation grew back so damned quickly. He simply didn’t have time to copy the pioneers’ caution. The trail left by his column would mark the bridge out to The Enemy as clearly as if he had put up signposts but by then it would have served its purpose. The issue would be decided, one way or another.

  The Leader retook point to cross. He didn’t bother to check for booby traps. If The Enemy had been clever enough to work out the secret of the tree trunk then they would’ve been clever enough to fit it with mines undetectable to the unassisted human eye.

  This was The Leader’s fourth run into Tashow, making him a veteran: a Fighter’s first run was usually a death sentence. There were rumours of Fighters surviving five or even more runs but The Leader had never met such a superman. No matter how experienced, how cunning or how careful, a veteran sooner or later hit the lethal probability number. One day sheer random chance was bound to get you.

  Personally, he suspected that rumours of multi-run heroes were concocted by Strategic Command to bolster morale. When a conscripted cohort was sent to The War their male relatives held funeral rites and the women tore their clothes in lamentation as if the soldiers were already dead. Bitter experience taught them not to anticipate returning heroes.

  The jungle was thinner on the Tashow side. Enemy mekanoids sprayed the border strip with herbicides at the end of each monsoon but the trees grew back even through the dry season. There was always sufficient new growth and herbicide-blasted trunks to provide reasonable cover. Of course, that cut both ways. The Enemy mostly favoured technology over people so he didn’t expect to encounter an Enemy ranger patrol. Nevertheless, The Leader scanned the jungle carefully. He always played the odds. Maybe that was why he had lasted this long; anything to delay that lethal probability number popping up.

  The Enemy had no more respect for McInleyland’s neutrality than The Fighters themselves so nowhere was exactly safe, but the danger inevitably increased after entering Enemy controlled territory even if that control was more theoretical than real.

  A splash and curse caused The Leader to swing around. He relaxed upon seeing a Fighter hauling himself back onto the makeshift bridge. Jumping to his feet, the dripping man scurried across carefully avoiding his Leader’s scornful gaze.

  The Leader made eye contact with the team Technician who imperceptibly shook his head.

  “You,” The Leader said to the wet Fighter. He hadn’t bothered to learn the man’s name as he was a first-timer so probably wouldn’t last long. “Take the rear and stop the girls straggling.”

  The Fighter sullenly obeyed, pushing his way roughly through the little mob of young women, all of whom had crossed successfully with their bicycles. He probably thought he was being punished but that wasn’t true.

  The Leader didn’t punish minor infringements in the field. Stupidity or clumsiness normally earned its own reward. A Fighter who proved a liability was simply put where he could do no harm. In the field that was commonly a shallow grave but The Leader still had a use for this idiot.

  The berry juice rubbed into his skin and hair irritated abominably which did absolutely nothing to improve his temper. He resisted the urge to scratch since drawing a single drop of blood might prove fatal. The Leader glowered at The Technician, the architect of this mad scheme. Perhaps it wasn’t entirely fair to lay all the blame at The Technician’s door but The Leader wasn’t feeling fair. He was feeling tired, terrified and, to cap it all, his purple-juice-stained skin itched and he couldn’t scratch.

  “Move out,” he said, leading by example.

  They made good time and covered at least two kilometres in the next hour before the whine of Enemy ‘koids above the tree canopy brought the column to a halt. There was no particular reason to stop moving—The Enemy stopped using primitive sensors such as motion detectors decades ago. It wasted too much ordnance on what was left of the wildlife.

  Not that the Enemy didn’t have the ordnance
to waste but apparently using it to dismember wildlife upset certain Enemy political factions. Who could grasp the strange fancies of foreigners?

  The Leader angrily waved a hand in a circle above his head and The Fighters spread out.

  The chuff, chuff of canister discharges sounded over the motor whine. Orange cylinders about the size of a thermos flask bounced through the tree canopy dislodging leaves and causing howler-monkeys to flee, swinging from branch to branch on their elongated arms while uttering their characteristic whoop, whoop warning cry.

  The canisters split open soundlessly as soon as they were in open air. Orange casings disintegrated into shards that fluttered on the ‘koids’ turbulent downblast like exotic butterflies.

  Clouds of dragonflies burst out. Only these weren’t insects any more than the canister shards; they were tiny ‘koids that The Fighters dubbed killer bees.

  One flew straight at The Leader. He showed no emotion but a close observer might have noticed whitened knuckles on the fingers gripping his machete; but there were no observers, close or otherwise. Everybody’s attention was on the swarm.

  The little machine paused for a quarter-second in front of his face, its electronic DNA analyser confused by berry juice but perhaps not quite confused enough. The leader stared back impassively. A psychologist would have been hard pressed to determine which was the man and which the machine if all he had to go on was the degree of emotion displayed.