Table of Contents

  AUTHOR’S NOTE

  QUAN LOI

  MEDLUM

  ELKIN

  MINDORO

  ZEMLYN’S WORLD

  MEDLUM

  OTKO

  TO CLEAR

  AWAY THE

  SHADOWS

  DAVID DRAKE

  Thank you for downloading this eBook.

  * * *

  All the books totally free of charge, if you like to receive our books on the next time, please Subscribe and join our free books group.

  Subscribe

  To Clear Away the Shadows

  David Drake

  NEW ENTRY IN DAVID DRAKE'S LANDMARK RCN SERIES

  ADVENTURES BEYOND THE EDGE OF THE KNOWN UNIVERSE

  The truce between Cinnabar and the Alliance is holding, and the Republic of Cinnabar Navy is able to explore regions of the galaxy without the explorers being swept up in great power conflict.

  The Far Traveller is probing sponge space to open routes for Cinnabar traders—and for RCN warships if war breaks out again. But besides astrogation, the Far Traveller is to survey and catalog life forms on the worlds it touches.

  Harry Harper has just been posted to the Traveller. He's an RCN officer by convention, a scientist by training—and a member of one of leading aristocratic families on Cinnabar by birth.

  Lieutenant Rick Grenville would rather serve on a warship in the heart of battle, but peace and the whim of the Navy Board have put him on an exploration vessel instead. He finds that the dangers on the fringes of civilization are just as great as those from missiles and gunfire that he expected to face.

  As internal struggles cause the Alliance to relax its iron grip, regional forces are attempting to increase their own power—and they're not fussy about the means they use.

  Besides the biological answers that officials on Cinnabar expect the Far Traveller to find, the ship's Director of Science, Doctor Veil, has her own agenda: to learn more about the Archaic Spacefarers who roamed the universe tens of thousands of years before humans reached the stars.

  The crew of the Far Traveller is poised to clear more of the shadows away from the deep past than ever before in human history—if they survive.

  BAEN BOOKS by DAVID DRAKE

  The RCN Series

  With the Lightnings • Lt. Leary, Commanding

  The Far Side of the Stars • The Way to Glory

  Some Golden Harbor • When the Tide Rises

  In the Stormy Red Sky • What Distant Deeps

  The Road of Danger • The Sea Without a Shore

  Death’s Bright Day • Though Hell Should Bar the Way

  To Clear Away the Shadows

  Time of Heroes Series

  The Spark • The Storm

  Hammer’s Slammers

  The Tank Lords • Caught in the Crossfire • The Sharp End

  The Complete Hammer’s Slammers, Volumes 1–3

  Independent Novels and Collections

  All the Way to the Gallows • Cross the Stars

  Foreign Legions, edited by David Drake • Grimmer Than Hell

  Loose Cannon • Night & Demons • Northworld Trilogy

  Patriots • The Reaches Trilogy • Redliners

  Seas of Venus • Starliner • Dinosaurs and a Dirigible

  The Citizen Series with John Lambshead

  Into the Hinterlands • Into the Maelstrom

  The General Series

  Hope Reborn with S.M. Stirling (omnibus)

  Hope Rearmed with S.M. Stirling (omnibus)

  Hope Renewed with S.M. Stirling (omnibus)

  Hope Reformed with S.M. Stirling and Eric Flint (omnibus)

  The Heretic with Tony Daniel • The Savior with Tony Daniel

  The Belisarius Series with Eric Flint

  An Oblique Approach • In the Heart of Darkness

  Belisarius I: Thunder Before Dawn (omnibus)

  Destiny’s Shield • Fortune’s Stroke

  Belisarius II: Storm at Noontide (omnibus)

  The Tide of Victory • The Dance of Time

  Belisarius III: The Flames of Sunset (omnibus)

  Edited by David Drake

  The World Turned Upside Down with Jim Baen & Eric Flint

  TO CLEAR

  AWAY THE

  SHADOWS

  DAVID DRAKE

  TO CLEAR AWAY THE SHADOWS

  This is a work of fiction. All the characters and events portrayed in this book are fictional, and any resemblance to real people or incidents is purely coincidental.

  Copyright © 2019 by David Drake

  All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book or portions thereof in any form.

  A Baen Books Original

  Baen Publishing Enterprises

  P.O. Box 1403

  Riverdale, NY 10471

  www.baen.com

  ISBN: 978-1-4814-8402-2

  eISBN: 978-1-62579-712-4

  Cover art by Stephen Hickman

  First printing, June 2019

  Distributed by Simon & Schuster

  1230 Avenue of the Americas

  New York, NY 10020

  Pages by Joy Freeman (www.pagesbyjoy.com)

  Printed in the United States of America

  10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  Electronic Version by Baen Books

  www.baen.com

  To Mark Geston

  AUTHOR’S NOTE

  There were earlier examples, but the nineteenth century was the great age of scientific exploration. Wealthy amateurs sometimes funded their own expeditions, but most were carried out with government support.

  This activity greatly increased knowledge of the natural world. For example, what is still believed to be the deepest point in the oceans, Challenger Deep, was plumbed by the 1872 Challenger Expedition—a joint effort by the Royal Society of London and the Royal Navy.

  More important for my purposes, these expeditions were often described by highly literate individuals who left personal accounts of amazing adventures. (The Voyage of the Beagle is one example.) I’ve read a lot of these both before and after I decided to use them as a model for this book.

  The complexity of the political situation was extreme, and the risks and discomfort these scientists were undergoing in their researches are truly remarkable. It’s with reason that this period is sometimes called the Heroic Age of Science.

  A note on the dedication. When I began writing in the 1960s, Mark Geston was one of the writers who were making waves in the SF field. By the time I left law in the eighties, Mark had become a full-time attorney. We’ve kept up a low-key correspondence over the years.

  Recently Mark sent me an anthology of British Great War poetry. Many of the selections were familiar, but some were not; among the latter, Robert Graves’ “To Lucasta on Going to the War—For the Fourth Time.” Graves was a scholar and a poet of note, but when Germany invaded Belgium in 1914 to start the war, he joined the British army as an officer of the 7th Welch Fusiliers.

  The fusiliers were originally raised to guard the artillery. They were equipped with fusils—flintlocks—instead of matchlocks and pikes. They had their own traditions and even a marching pace different from that of other British infantry. They were a picked force.

  Exactly what that means is here in Graves’ poem:

  Lucasta, when to France your man

  Returns his fourth time, hating war,

  Yet laughs as calmly as he can

  And flings an oath, but says no more.

  That is not courage, that’s not fear—

  Lucasta he’s a Fusilier.

  And his pride sends him here.

  I understand perfectly; because I rode with the Blackhorse in Viet Nam and Cambodia.

  —Dave Drake

  Diogenes

  A hut, and a tree,

  And a hill for me,

  And a piece of a weedy meadow.

  I’ll ask no thing,

  Of God or King,

  But to clear away his shadow.

  —Max Eastman

  QUAN LOI

  Lieutenant Richard Grenville looked over the side of the aircar. They were travelling between West Haven, Quan Loi’s main starport where the RCS Far Traveller had landed, and Helle, the much smaller and less developed port to the east of the mountain chain.

  The only thing Rick could find positive about the land to the car’s left was that it wasn’t as boring as the sea they’d flown over to avoid the spine of the mountains. The highest elevation was three thousand feet. The car—really a truck with room for three in the cab and a considerable cargo volume in back—could climb to ten thousand if everything worked properly. Tech 2 Kent, the Biology Section driver, didn’t want to test that and Rick, whose normal duties didn’t involve travel of any sort on a planet, was happy to let Kent decide.

  An aircar glided like a brick. If the fans failed, the vehicle would hit the ground with whatever velocity gravity could give it. Their current fifty-foot altitude was probably enough to kill the occupants, but Rick figured there was a chance.

  “Why did he land at Helle?” Kent said. “There’s nothing there. There’s bloody little at Haven.”

  “I doubt Harper had much choice about it,” Rick said. “He was assigned to the Goliath, but she landed with damage on Morroworld. Her captain arranged the best way to get Harper to the Far Traveller, and the choices aren’t great here in the back of beyond.”

  Rick was wearing a brand new second class uniform in honor
of the man they were picking up. The collar rubbed, but he supposed he was lucky that he didn’t own a first class uniform. Captain Bolton would have insisted he wear full dress to greet their new officer. A utility uniform with a saucer hat were as much formality as any officer should need for duty on a survey vessel on a distant station.

  “Sir?” said Kent as he lifted the car slightly to clear a stand of trees with snaky, reddish branches. “If you don’t mind me asking? This guy’s Biology Section, right? So I see why I’m picking him up since I’m the Bio driver…but why’re you along? Was he a buddy at the Academy?”

  “I don’t think that Lieutenant Harry Harper even attended the Academy,” Rick said. He wasn’t angry about it, just maybe a little envious. “He’s a boffin like your Doctor Veil. The reason I’m here is that his dad’s a senator and owns half of Ruislip County; at least that’s what Bangs, the adjutant’s clerk, tells me.”

  Kent whistled in surprise.

  Rick nodded with a twisted smile. “Yeah,” he said. “You know how Captain Bolton is about the nobility. I half thought he was going to come along and greet the new addition to the Fart’s complement himself, but he finally decided that I would do. I hope Harper won’t want me to tug my forelock.”

  That was probably a little more informal than Rick should have been with a technician, but third lieutenant on a survey ship wasn’t what he’d joined the Republic of Cinnabar Navy for. Being sent out to nursemaid some well-born amateur made the situation even worse.

  “Look, if he’s got that kinda clout…,” said Kent. Below, a surface ship, really a timber raft, was hugging the shore as it headed in the same direction as they were. “Then what’s he coming to us for?”

  “Hell if I know!” Rick said, but the situation suddenly struck him funny. “If it was me, I’d get assigned to a pirate chaser since that’s the only kind of action the RCN’s got so long as the treaty with the Alliance holds. If Harper’s not really a naval officer, I can see that might not be something he’d look forward to. But why the Far Traveller, that I sure can’t say.”

  “I think we’re getting there, sir,” Kent said in a different tone, swinging the steering yoke to put the car into a climbing turn which heeled them over. Rick looked down over his side of the hull toward a shallow bay into which long piers thrust. In the center was an artificial island—possibly floating—with a causeway and tram to the shore which was encircled by sheds roofed with corrugated steel or structural plastic.

  Three starships were anchored near the island. One was so small that it might be intended for transport within the Quan Loi system; another was a standard freighter of about two thousand tonnes displacement when it was floating as now on the water of the harbor. Rick figured that was the Belleisle, the tramp which had hauled their intended passenger here from Morroworld, where the damaged Goliath had landed.

  “What’s that tub on the outside?” Kent said. “It looks like a barrel and I’ll bet it handles like one.”

  “Put us down on the shore as near as you can to the causeway,” Rick said. If their passenger was still aboard the Belleisle, he supposed they’d have to walk up to the island unless he could get the port authorities to give them a ride on the tram.

  “As for the ship,” he continued, looking critically at the oddly shaped vessel, “I suspect that’s from the Yamato Cluster, the Shining Empire they’re calling themselves now. They’re pretty active in this region, from what I can figure out from the briefing material. We don’t even have proper charts of this region. Well, that’s why Navy House sent a survey ship, I suppose.”

  Rick guessed he shouldn’t complain about being on a survey ship. If this post hadn’t appeared, he’d have been on the beach where hundreds of other young officers had ended up when Navy House decided that peace with the Alliance was going to hold. Half pay for a junior lieutenant was a license to starve, and Rick didn’t have family money or rich friends he could touch.

  The RCN hadn’t operated in the galactic north during the forty years of warfare with Guarantor Porra’s Alliance of Free Stars. The region wasn’t entirely under Alliance control, but the practical routes into it were, so there was no Cinnabar-flagged trade into it. Peace opened new markets for Cinnabar merchants, and the RCN had decided to map routes to aid them. In addition to the civilian benefits, it kept skills current in the ships’ complements involved and it could remind senators at appropriation time that the RCN was a valuable asset even during peace.

  “Okay,” said Kent. “I think there’s room right at the south edge of the causeway. If it’s wet, I may be throwing up some mud, though.”

  In fact Kent brought them in smoothly on what turned out to be dark-brown ground cover rather than bare dirt. The truck was used to place collectors to gather biological material for that portion of the Far Traveller’s survey, so Kent must have a lot of experience landing in places that got very little traffic.

  “Good job, Kent,” Rick said as he opened the cab door. “Now all we have to do is find Lieutenant Harry Harper.”

  “That would be me,” called the man standing in front of the nearest shed. He must have been sitting on some of the considerable amount of luggage sheltered within.

  And by the Almighty, he was wearing a first class RCN uniform, Dress Whites!

  * * *

  Joss, the Goliath’s Biology Section hunter was hoping to transfer to the Far Traveller with me. She got up from the box she’d been sitting on and said, “D’ye hear it? That’s a forty-five twelve or I’m Guarantor Porra!”

  “What’s a forty-five twelve?” I asked, getting to my feet also. The short answer was, “One more thing Harry Harper was going to have to learn about.” There’d been a lot of those already during my short passage on the Goliath.

  Joss looked over her shoulder at me. “Sorry, sir,” she said. She was always polite but she gave me the willies anyway. The right side of her face looked like somebody’d scraped it with barbed wire, and her body was tattooed; at least as much as I could see beneath shorts and a utility shirt. A jacket, the RCN called the garment.

  Many of the spacers on the Goliath were tattooed, but the heavy knife Joss wore under her belt was as unusual as her scarring. I guess she had it for her duties collecting specimens on the ground. It made me uncomfortable around her also, but it was just something I had to accept now that I was in the military.

  “A forty-five twelve is a utility aircar,” she explained, “basically a light truck with two pairs of fans. They’re standard in the RCN—Bio Section on the Goliath had one, so I’m guessing this is our ride.”

  She pursed her lips and added, “The Alliance has the same sorta vehicle, but they’re called Fourriers, no matter which company made them.”

  I looked up in the direction Joss’ eyes were turned toward and saw an aircar coming toward us. Until I saw the vehicle, I hadn’t separated out the note of the lift fans from the general racket of the harbor area.

  “You’ve seen Alliance cars, then?” I said. I didn’t focus my eyes on Joss as I spoke to her. She seemed to be a perfectly nice person, but I worried that I’d let something show on my face if I looked directly at her.

  “Yeah, I was in the army for about ten years,” Joss said, her eyes still on the aircar. “A mercenary, I guess, in a drop commando. Heyer’s.”

  I didn’t know what a drop commando was, but I decided not to ask for an explanation. I hadn’t heard any emotion in her words, but there was something in her voice that bothered me. Maybe it was just the complete lack of emotion.