And now I'm going to bed. Ge thee behind me, internet!
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.II.
Midnight came midday with the curse of God.
Mountains took flame and valleys were clawed
By talons of fire and fountains of stone
As children died in the darkness alone
When light disappeared and Home was crushed
In floodtides of death and a torrent of dust.
Tumult, destruction, devastation, and fear.
And out of the darkness, silence.
— The Dark Fall Saga.
* * * * * * * * * *
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 Rob Pierre had exported to the planet all agreed no fresh eruption was imminent, but they also agreed that there’d been at least six of them over the past thirteen or fourteen 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 flew past and 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 less than forty T-years ago; for the Sanctuarians and their ancestors, it had begun almost two thousand years ago, in 40 PD, when the colony ship Calvin’s Hope had departed the Sol System on the 395-light-year voyage to their new home. Despite the fact that their vessel was fitted with improved particle screening, capable of sustaining a normal-space velocity of seventy percent of light-speed, her passengers had expected to spend over five and a half centuries in cryo sleep.
In fact, it had taken them just a bit longer than that, although the rest of the galaxy hadn’t known that. In fact, most of the galaxy stil l didn’t know that.
But the Republic of Haven did, and that was the source of Eloise Pritchart’s moral quandary.
No one in Nouveau Paris had ever expected to discover a wormhole terminus less than seventy light-years from the Haven System, associated with the planetless, barren M3 dwarf listed solely as J-156-18(L).
The discovery had been a distinct shock for the survey crew which detected the J-156-18(L) Terminus in 1879 PD literally by accident. Their ship hadn’t even been supposed to visit the thoroughly useless star. Indeed, her skipper had stopped off en route to the far more promising J-193-18(L) System to let his crew train on a star about which everything was already known . . . only to discover that not quite “everything” had been known after all.
J-156-18(L) was useless as a home for mankind, but there’d been vast excitement in Nouveau Paris when the wormhole was reported. A crew of proper hyper-physicists had been dispatched immediately and quickly discovered that it was one terminus of a 583.8-LY warp bridge . . . and that its other terminus was the KCR-126-04 System.
KCR-126-04.
That news must have struck the Legislaturalists as one of the bleakest bad jokes in the entire universe, because that star system — also known as the Calvin System — lay at the heart of one of the great tragedies of pre-Warshawski sail history, and a more useless piece of real estate would have been impossible to imagine.
The G4 star had once been touted as prime real estate for interstellar colonization, with a habitable planet which could have been Old Terra’s twin . . . only better. The reports of the daredevil hyper-space survey teams had waxed almost poetic describing the planet Calvin III’s temperature, atmosphere, hydrosphere, and the glorious nights of its triple moons. Bidding for the colonization rights had been brisk, despite the vast distance from Sol, and the Calvin Expedition had departed Old Terra only seventeen T-years after the Beowulf expedition.
Without Warshawski sails, no colony expedition was mad enough to make a voyage that long through hyper, and the expedition to Calvin was no exception. Its organizers had accepted the risks of a 560-year normal-space voyage as by far the lesser of two evils, and they’d invested not just money but intelligence and imagination to provide against them.
Unfortunately, no one’s imagination had included a dinosaur killer fit to dwarf the impact which had put a punctuation point to Old Terra’s Cretaceous period at Chicxulub. The Chicxulub Crater was a hundred and eighty kilometers in diameter; the Calvin III Crater was over three hundred, and from the available evidence, that massive celestial hammer must have struck less than fifty years before the cryo-sleep colony ship reached its destination in 604 PD. Even today, thirteen T-centuries later, the planet Calvin remained a bleak, barren place whose shattered ecosystem had scarcely begun to heal. In fact, most climatologists and biologists were unsure where they were observing a recovery or simply the final throes and death rattle of an entire planet’s slow, lingering murder.
In 604, no colony could possibly have survived upon its surface.
No one had ever known what had happened to Calvin’s Hope and her doomed passengers. The “slow boat” colony ships had been designed for one-way trips, without the endurance and capacity to return to their destination. The colonists who’d settled the planet Grayson had discovered the downsides of that, although theirs might be something of an extreme example, given the way they’d deliberately disabled their ship’s cryo facilities upon arrival. But Calvin’s Hope had been a less capable design to begin with, and she’d exhausted her entire planned endurance reaching Calvin in the first place. Even without the . . . questionable decision of Austin Grayson and the other Elders of the Church of Humanity Unchanged, there’d been no way she could possibly have taken her passengers home, and there’d been no way at all to send any messages back to the Sol System across 400 LY.
Nor had there been any point, six hundred T-years before Adrienne Warshawski made hyper-space safe for colony ship-sized transports.
A follow-on expedition with proper Warshawski sails had finally been sent in 1406, but it found no trace of the colonists or their ship. And so Calvin’s Hope had vanished into history alongside the Agnes Celeste and a hundred other legendary interstellar shipwrecks and mysteries.
The Havenite hyper-physicists who’d set out so jubilantly to explore the J-156-18(L) Terminus had returned subdued and shaken by the wrecked star system they’d discovered at the far end. They’d known where they were, of course — Calvin was one of the epic tragedies of the Diaspora, cited in every history of human exploration written since the fifteenth century — but none of them had ever expected to actually see it.
The Legislaturalists, immune to the poignancy of the long-ago tragedy, had immediately started laying ambitious plans to open the warp bridge to interstellar commerce. They’d hoped for a terminus in a more useful location, of course, preferably one with inhabited star systems suitable for trade — or, Legislaturalists being Legislaturalists, for conquest — in the vicinity. It was regrettable that the region around KCR-126-04 was dominated by M and K-class stars, with the limited liquid-water zones of their kind, which was what had made KCR-126-04’s G4 primary and the survey crews’ rhapsodic reports on Calvin III such a surprise. There’d never been anything else in close proximity to it to attract settlement, however, when there were so very many other stars with far more promising possibilities. Still, KCR-126-04 was only 170 LY from Asgerd and less than four hundred from Old Terra itself, outflanking the Manticoran Wormhole Junction. Surely that had to be useful!
Regrettably, they’d soon realized it wasn’t, really. Asgerd might be only 170 LY away, but that was still a 58-day voyage for a merchant vessel, and that was the closest inhabited system. However they looked at it, there wouldn’t be any local magnets for interstellar shipping, and it wouldn’t even give the People’s Republic any readier access to the Solarian merchants selling it goods at exorbitant prices. At that time, twenty-five T-years before the Battle of Hancock, commerce between the PRH and the Solarian League had passed through the Manticoran Wormhole Junction. For a trip from the Haven System to the Sol System, the new warp bridge would actually have required a normal-space voyage more than three times as long as the Haven-Trevor’s Star-Manticore-Beowulf-Sol route.
There would be very little traffic across their new warp bridge, they decided. In fact, its discovery had given added point to the value of . . . acquiring the Star Kingdom of Manticore and played a not insignificant part in their subsequent strategic thinking. Coordinated with the far larger, much more far-reaching Manticore Junction’s Gregor Terminus and the Durandel-Asgerd bridge, their new route would turn into a likely profit maker after all. And so they’d kept quiet about it . . . especially after one of Hereditary President Harris’ advisers had pointed out its potential value as a staging point for an unexpected attack upon Manticore from a completely different direction.
Assuming, of course, that any such attack was ever made necessary by Manticore’s relentless economic war against the hardworking proletarians of the People’s Republic, he’d added, undoubtedly with a suitably pious expression.
The Peoples Navy was both more pragmatic and less prone to hypocrisy when it came to conquering other people than its political masters. But it was also less enthusiastic about any military value the new warp bridge might possess, given the 200 LY between Calvin and Manticore. There was, the Octogan had patiently pointed out, no need for staging bases that far from their target just because they wanted to attack from a “different direction.” Particularly given that there was no such thing as — or need for — “different directions” for an assault launched through hyper-space, since no one could see it coming until it translated back into n-space at its target anyway. Nonetheless, the Harris Administration had insisted that the PN at least “explore the possibilities,” and Admiral Cargill, Amos Parnell’s predecessor as CNO had agreed to comply, then handed the assignment off to one of her underlings with instructions to Do Something and keep the damned politicians off her back.
The “something” in this case turned out to be a follow-up expedition charged with evaluating the system’s possible military utility and what it would take to capitalize upon 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, the expedition’s commander had decided that since the planet Calvin itself was obviously unsuitable as a site for any planetary installations, surveying the closest half-dozen or so neighboring star systems for possible alternate bases should certainly convince the Navy’s political masters of how thoroughly it had applied itself to carrying out its vital mission.
What he’d 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, 14.4 LY from her original destination, in the L5 Lagrange point between the second planet of the KCR-126-06 system and its 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 fourteen 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. Undoubtedly, that information had been in her computers once upon a time, but the 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 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 almost 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 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.
According to Dark Fall, the colonists’ chosen site for the enclave they’d named simply Home had been in a fertile, sheltered mountain valley. 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 exaggeration!
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.
Ellis 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 the Dark Fall Eruption had almost been enough by itself. The Sanctuarians might have survived it, yet 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 just under a billion, despite how savagely it had been winnowed, 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 had very little axial tilt, giving it extremely mild seasons, human biochemistry was resistant to almost all of its native diseases, and it was readily apparent that the Dark Fall Eruption’s survivors had managed to preserve their domestic animals, as well as themselves.
But Sanctuary’s steadily growing population had remained trapped at the bottom of its gravity well, which was particularly ironic, given Refuge’s deep-space industrial potential. Had they retained access to the technology with which they’d arrived, Refuge would have become one of the most populous, heavily industrialized star systems in the known galaxy. It possessed not one asteroid belt, or even the three belts of a star like Manticore-B. It had six of them, including the 62,000,000-kilometer wide Epsilon Belt fifteen light-minutes beyond the system hyper-limit. Indeed, subsequent analysis from the Calvin III Crater suggested that the dinosaur killer which had devastated the colonists’ original destination had been a stray from Epsilon.
Anyone but the People’s Republic of Haven would have immediately announced the discovery of the lost Calvin Expedition's descendents. The Legislaturalists, however, had seen an enormous opportunity. Not only was Refuge incredibly rich in raw materials, but it offered a labor force almost a billion strong. A labor force without a single clue about what lay beyond the bounds of their own planetary atmosphere . . . or of the staggering wealth their system’s astrography represented.
A labor force which ought to be eager to repay its deliverers for the wonders of the modern technology — the almost magical technology — they brought with them.
It was the sort of situation a bureaucrat in the Solarian League’s Office of Frontier Security could only dream of.
Of course, there’d been a certain amount of startup expense, but once the Sanctuarians had been given the tools, they’d dug in even more enthusiastically than the Manties’ Graysons. And the Legislaturalists — and, later, the Committee of Public Safety — had been able to send thousands upon thousands of teachers, doctors, supervisors, and engineers from places like Cerberus and the other prisons in which they had stowed away so many “dangerous recidivists.”
Which was how, thirty-seven T-years later, the Refuge System had come to be home to the Bolthole Complex, the biggest and most modern shipyard and industrial nexus of the entire Republic of Haven. Indeed, despite its still tiny population (by Core World standards), Bolthole’s capacity was superior to that of any Fringe World and at least a quarter of the League’s Core systems.
An industrial complex, she thought now, which rightfully belongs to the people of Sanctuary, not to us! And what possible right – what excuse — can we have for keeping those same people penned up inside their own star system? Hasn’t the galaxy done enough to these people without us taking advantage of their tragedy?
No doubt it had, but Theisman was obviously right about at least two things.
At the moment, he and his fleet commanders – especially Javier Giscard and Lester Tourville — were engaged in a bitter five-way civil war which would ultimately decide the future of the Republic of Haven. If Theisman’s Navy won, Eloise Pritchart might actually be allowed to restore the Péricard Constitution, the goal for which she’d fought for over forty T-years. If it lost, God only knew what would become of the Republic. The momentum had been shifting steadily in Theisman’s favor for the last several months, but that was always subject to change, especially if they suffered heavy losses. Little wonder the Secretary of War had thought a secret shipyard, hidden away in his back pocket in case he needed it, would make a splendid insurance policy.
As the last commanding officer of the Capital Fleet under Oscar Saint-Just, he’d been thoroughly briefed on Bolthole’s capabilities, although they’d only just begun actually delivering ships at that point. He’d also been able to discover its location, and the fact that Saint-Just had personally selected People’s Commissioner Jacqueline Hammond, one of his most senior and trusted StateSec commissioners, to oversee Bolthole and ensure its reliability.
And Thomas Theisman had been only too well aware of the consequences if a shipbuilding complex of that capacity remained in the hands of StateSec loyalists.
Which was why he’d sent his own people’s commissioner, Dennis LePic, to visit Hammond with a dispatch from Saint-Just . . . who’d happened to be dead at the moment. As a fellow people’s commissioner, LePic had been able to get close enough to personally deliver his actual message — from Theisman, not Saint-Just. As it happened, he was an excellent shot, and his “administrative assistants” had delivered the same message simultaneously to Citizen Commissioner Hammond’s entire staff. At which point the “StateSec” superdreadnought which had transported them to Refuge brought up her sidewalls, identified herself as a regular Navy ship, and suggested it would be a good idea to listen to the new System Administrator.
There’d been some scattered resistance by State Security personnel. But no one had been that foolish within range of PHNS Péricard’s energy batteries, and what little resistance there had been, in more distant parts of the system, had ended quickly. Hammond and her staff had been dead and the Navy personnel assigned to Bolthole all knew. Thomas Theisman’s reputation. Ninety percent of them had rallied to LePic, and that had been that.
Yet Theisman had refused to use any of the superdreadnoughts being built in Refuge against his opponents, and that was because of his second — and, Pritchart thought, far more important argument — for maintaining the Bolthole status quo.
She’d seen enough of Thomas Theisman by now to realize Javier had been right. None of the warlords contending for Rob Pierre’s mantle were remotely his equal as a strategist or as a leader, and not one of them could match his ability to inspire the men and women under his command. They truly believed they could end the long nightmare which had enveloped their star nation for so long, and they believed he was the commander who could make that possible. Eventually, he was going to win, with or without the Bolthole ships, and, in the process, allow Pritchart to restore not just the Péricard Constitution but also a Republic worthy of that constitution.
And when she did, what happened next?
Neither Theisman nor Pritchart had any desire to continue the People’s Republic’s conquering ways, but they had a moral obligation to liberate any Havenite star systems currently under occupation by the Manticoran Alliance. Pritchart was realist enough to accept that not all those star systems wanted to be liberated, and it was hard to blame them, given the contrast between their experiences under foreign occupation and what they’d experienced under the “benevolence” of their legal government. Assuming the Manties and their allies were prepared to agree to genuine plebiscites to determine those systems’ future, she had no objection to their declaring their independence of the Republic which had acquired so many of them through conquest.
Unfortunately, it was becoming increasingly obvious that the Manties had no intention of agreeing to anything of the sort.
Neither Pritchart nor her foreign policy experts — including Kevin Usher, one of the canniest analysts she’d ever met . . . and the only one she trusted without qualification — were sure exactly why the High Ridge Government refused to negotiate in good faith, but it was obvious that it did. And not just about future plebiscites. Elaine Descroix, the Manticoran Foreign Secretary, might keep blathering away about the need to be certain the Pritchart Administration was both the legitimate Havenite government and likely to survive before Manticore “legitimized” it by negotiating with it. Her correspondence might include all sorts of dangled carrots for the wonderful day when Pritchart had demonstrated — to Manticoran satisfaction, of course — that her government wa s going to survive. But in the meantime, she had no intention of beginning even preliminary discussion of a single one of the points in contention between Landing and Nouveau Paris.
Not one.
And that meant that, for whatever reason, Prime Minister High Ridge had decided against negotiating an actual peace treaty. And, far worse, the current balance of military power justified his arrogant refusal far too completely for him to be likely to change his mind anytime soon. The Republic of Haven Navy had none of the pod-laying superdreadnoughts armed with the multidrive missiles which had driven Oscar Saint-Just to the brink of surrender before the last-second reprieve of the Cromarty Assassination put High Ridge into the premiership. The Havenite Civil War, for all its bloodshed and carnage, was being fought by obsolete ships armed with obsolescent weapons, and only the fact that none of the adversaries had access to modern weapons had permitted it to go on so long.
Just as any imaginable confrontation between those obsolete ships and the massive firepower of the Royal Manticoran Navy and its Grayson allies could end only in one-sided massacre.
Without some effective countermeasure to the Manty wall of battle and the Star Kingdom’s new-model LACs, there was no way to force High Ridge to come to the negotiating table in good faith. He was one of the very few interstellar politicians who, in Pritchart’s considered opinion, was at least as bad as the Legislaturalists had been, and he believed — with reason — that he held the whip hand. As long as he did, he would continue his current policies, and it was entirely possible — likely — that if he suspected even for a moment that the Republic was in the process of acquiring that sort of countermeasure, he would order the RMN to resume the offensive immediately to force Haven’s unconditional surrender before it did.
Which was Theisman’s entire point, because exactly “that sort of countermeasure” was what was being built right here in Refuge.
How do I resolve this? she thought bitterly. I’m the President of the Republic of Haven. Obviously, my first and highest responsibility is to my citizens, not the Sanctuarians or anyone else in the damned galaxy! And over and above that, what about my responsibility to the men and women like Javier and Lester — and Theisman — who’ve already fought and died for the Constitution we’re trying to restore? But morally, how do I justify continuing to treat Refuge and everyone living here the same way Frontier Security treats its ‘clients’ . . . only more so. At least the rest of the galaxy knows the Protectorates exist! That puts some limits on what OFS and its cronies can get away with where they’re concerned. But Refuge . . . .
She leaned back against her seat’s head rest as the shuttle raced onward toward Mountain Fort and closed her eyes.
