The Aethers of Mars Read online

  Alexander sighed in soft relief.

  “Attention, please. The Blenheim has landed. Passengers should prepare to board.”

  He rose, holding his bag. Paris awaited.

  * * *

  Chapter 16

  Deception within deception. Such was the nature of the struggle against the Okhrana, driven by harsh necessity. The Tsar’s secret police surpassed any other in the world, in their subtlety as well as their brutality. It was they who had forged the Protocols of the Elders of Zion; they, also, who had perfected the use of double agents and provocateurs.

  So, the SRP’s Combat Organization had responded in kind. A traitor had been found, Maxim Pechkin, uncovered by Vladimir Burtsev and his small band of counter-infiltrators. The man would normally have been executed by Eser agents, but this time he was allowed to run free for several years.

  Years in which the Combat Organization slowly and carefully built up the legend of the master assassin, Gavril Savinkov. Then, two years ago, Pechkin was finally executed. The deed was done in secret, shortly after the assassination of a provincial governor. The body was left in a place where it could eventually be discovered, with evidence planted that suggested it was the corpse of none other than Savinkov himself. Dead of wounds incurred in the course of the governor’s assassination, it seemed.

  When the time came, an anonymous source notified the Okhrana of the body’s location. The master assassin, gone at last.

  * * *

  Deception within deception. Gavril Savinkov had never existed, and the Okhrana now believe the phantom to be dead. But Savinkov …

  That master assassin did exist, and was still quite alive. And now, in position to strike the needed blow when the time finally came.

  A time which would certainly take years, before the conditions had matured. Years in which a new and powerful revolutionary alliance could be forged; with Mars as its bastion; an alliance that could finally confront the world’s oppressors. Years in which the master assassin could slowly blend into the target’s surroundings; learning all that needed to be learned; preparing all that needed to be prepared.

  Throughout, the Okhrana would remain blind to the danger, for no Russian was Savinkov’s new target. Not even the Tsar himself.

  Cecil Rhodes. When the time came and the alliance was finally forged, he would be the one brought down. He was the master of the space-going warcraft that had destroyed the Boers and broken the English Navy’s resistance. With him gone, and the great alliance ready to rise up, there would be no power left that could rescue the world’s tyrants and autocrats.

  * * *

  “It’s time to go, Vera! It’s time!” Adrian Luff was practically dancing with eagerness. “Just think! We’ve never gone so deep into the labyrinth before! Maybe we’ll run across a minotaur!”

  Charlotte rolled her eyes. Edward Luff just smiled and extended his hand.

  Savinkov took the hand. There was no reason not to enjoy life in the meantime, after all. Wounds were healing, Savinkov’s as well as the physical ones Drezhner had inflicted on the boy. The master assassin would make sure the family that provided the ultimate shelter for the mission would emerge unscathed, when the time came.

  If it came at all. There was no way to know.

  Rhodes might die of natural causes. Or a Martian might kill him. He was hated by a great many.

  The possibilities were endless. A horse might even learn to sing.

  * * *

  Introducing Chuck Gannon

  Eric Flint

  I met Chuck Gannon in 2009 at Lunacon, New York City’s science fiction convention. I was the toastmaster at the convention that year, but the real draw for me was that Dave Freer was the Guest of Honor and Mercedes Lackey and her husband Larry Dixon were also attending. Dave, Misty and I have been working on the Heirs of Alexandria series for more than a decade now, but we’d only managed to meet once with all of us present. That was at the 2000 Worldcon in Chicago.

  The problem lay with Dave, who had the ill grace to be born and raised in South Africa. South Africa is roughly 9000 miles from the American Midwest, where Misty and I both live, and you have to cross one and a half oceans to get there. Needless to say, in-person meetings were few and far between. I’d been able to meet with Dave on a second occasion, at the World Fantasy Convention held in Madison, WI, in 2005, but Misty hadn’t been able to attend.

  So Lunacon would be only the second time all three of us would be able to get together, and only the third time I’d be able to meet Dave in person. By then, Dave and I had co-authored five novels together in addition to the three we’d written with Misty, something which would have been quite impossible before the advent of the internet.

  It turned out that serendipity was alive and well. While I was at the convention, I met Chuck—and he and I have since gone on to co-author one novel (1635: The Papal Stakes), with two more in the works and, of course, the project that you now hold in your hand: The Aethers of Mars.

  The way we met was the way these things so often happen at conventions. We both wound up on a panel together, and things went from there.

  Being honest, my memory of the occasion is fuzzy. All I recall was that there was this fellow I’d never met sitting at the other end of the table, and in the course of the panel discussion he advanced opinions which struck me as lucid and well-reasoned, being as they generally agreed with mine. I attribute this imprecision in my recollections to my advancing years—not, I hasten to add, resulting from decrepitude or dementia but from the simple fact that as one ages one steadily grows wiser, which has the inevitable side effect of crowding out memories which are not essential to said increase in sagacity.

  Chuck, being of more tender years and thus still burdened with trivial recall, says that what happened was this:

  * * *

  “On March 2, 2009, at Lunacon, and in the Brundage room, there was a 3:00 PM panel entitled “Military SF vs. ‘War Porn.’” You were there, as was Dave Freer, the GoH (for whom you had been invited as Toastmaster), and Chuck Rothman. Tom Kratman was scheduled but did not attend, as I recall.

  At any rate, most of the conversation had, as often happens, morphed into a related but distinct topic: in this case, writing action sequences. At some point, after I remarked on how economy in description in writing action has parallels to fast cuts in cinematic action, you leaned over to look down the table at me, and uttered the first words ever exchanged between us: ‘Have you sent me anything?’ (You were referring to Jim Baen’s Universe at the time.) When I responded in the negative, you said, ‘Then send me something.’

  We chatted afterward, which ultimately moved on into the hallway for a longer chat, just at the margins of what was then a buffet restaurant. You weren’t sure that JBU was going to survive. We had talked about 1632, but then you were waving it off, saying that you generally did not invite pros there, that it was minimum SFWA rate and a lot to learn and etc. etc. etc.

  I waited for you to finish and explained that, yeah, I had pro credits, but that was quite a while ago, and I had no illusions or qualms about paying dues to re-enter the market. Was glad for the work and thrilled at the opportunity. And so things began …”

  * * *

  Given that Chuck’s memory seems more complete than mine—more detailed, for a certainty—I see no point in wasting my time rewriting the biographical notes he sent me, when the notes themselves are perfectly coherent. He goes on to say:

  * * *

  “The chat we had alongside the restaurant was where my background was set out. In 2009, it had been seventeen years since I’d worked in TV. That and my fiction career had ended at the same time, I explained. And this was the story (sounds like I’m introducing an episode of Naked City …)

  I had been working freelance in TV (about 75% FT) and filling in the rest writing for games. And fiction. At pretty much the same time in 1991, after getting my first pure SF credit by publishing a novella in Pournelle’s War World (#4: Invasion), I had t
hree novel contracts pretty much fall into my lap. One was an offer to do the next War World novel with John Carr. He’d already been in possession of a 35K word story, really liked my writing, started putting together a letter of agreement. About the same time, the game company approached me to write two novels as product-support (write for hire deals), one SF, one a kind of urban fantasy/near sf/horror project.

  I was elated. I was also strapped for time. Went to the TV folks. Who told me: good you came to talk to us about work. We want—need—to hire you full time. I explained I had come needing to cut back to no more than half-time. They wished me well and told me not to let the door hit me on the ass on my way out: there were (literally) hundreds of people who’d kill to get the job I was turning down. And they were probably right. (I suspect they overstated the number willing to commit homicide: that was probably only dozens.)

  Then, as happens in this biz, fate intervened in a most unwelcome fashion. The game company’s management changed and the contracts were killed: change in direction (introducing them to the concept of a kill fee required a lawyer, sadly). Shortly thereafter, Jerry Pournelle declared an immediate and across-the-board cessation of all his anthologies—and all related projects. The War World novel was gone, too.

  I had gone from three novels to no novels in a matter of months. And the game company which had been an increasing part of my income was now “the party of the other part” in an arbitration over the kill fees for seven killed contracts. My freelance line of income was dead, and the TV bus had left. So I activated plan B: academia. A way to make a living and do some writing. How little “some” was only became evident when I was married and started having kids. And so, in 2007, we moved and I took the plunge—not taking another academic job but going FT writing.”

  * * *

  And there you have it. The career of one Chuck Gannon, SF author, known in his former life as Dr. Charles E. Gannon, Distinguished Professor of English at St. Bonaventure University. Professional fiction scribblers invariably shed titles rather than acquire them and our terms of appellation slide from “Esteemed Colleague” and “Professor” to “Hey, You.”

  The first things Chuck did for me was to write a couple of pieces of short fiction for one of the anthologies in the 1632 series (aka the Ring of Fire series). Those were “Birds of a Feather” and “Upward Mobility,” which appeared in Ring of Fire III, published by Baen Books in 2011. We then started working on a collaborative novel in the series, 1635: The Papal Stakes, which came out in October 2012.

  By the time it did, however, a novel which Chuck had co-authored with Steve White in the Starfire series had also come out. That was Extremis, published in May 2011.

  Chuck’s first solo novel, Fire With Fire, came out in April of 2013, followed by a novella he wrote for David Weber’s latest Honor Harrington anthology, Beginnings. That came out in July, three months later.

  The speed with which his career took off explains the awkward fact that his appearance in this volume as a “fledgling” and “undiscovered” author is starting to look a bit ridiculous. Hey, how was I supposed to know? When I was approached by Mike Resnick to do one of the volumes in this series, which are supposed to couple a well-established author with a newcomer, Chuck had practically nothing published yet.

  Chuck and I discussed several possibilities for this volume. We finally decided on a steampunk setting because: a) Chuck had already worked out most of the background—see my remarks above on the subject of not wasting time—and b) I’d never written a steampunk story and it sounded like fun.

  So. Introducing Chuck Gannon. You’ll be seeing a lot more of him, unless I’m wildly mistaken—and I’m not. See comments concerning wisdom and the sagacity of age above.

  * * *

  BOOK TWO: WHITE SAND, RED DUST

  by Charles E. Gannon

  Part One: White Sand

  September 1902: Cairo, Earth

  A sudden blast of white-yellow light awakened Conrad von Harrer despite his sleep-lidded eyes. Then, without warning, he seemed to be falling away from that brightness, which dimmed as a great weight pulled him down under the surface of a roiling expanse of hallucinations and memory fragments that thickened and darkened about him …

  Struggling back up, Conrad willed his eyes to open … and discovered that they already were; this time, he realized that it was the white of the ceiling that was roaring into his head with a pain so sharp that it blurred his vision.

  He shielded his eyes with his left hand, felt strangely detached from that motion, from his arm and his body: no, the opium hadn’t worn off yet. He rubbed at the sleep sand crusting his eyes—which occasioned a second, sharper stab of discomfort. But this pain was at the base of his skull, clearly defined and with a faintly stiff quality. It was the aftermath of a hard physical blow, the kind used to incapacitate, or even kill. Something had happened last night, someone must have attacked him …

  Sluggishly, an image rose up to meet that conjecture. Conrad saw a triumphant smile on a sharp, swarthy, hard-eyed face. He remembered the first blow of the calloused fists, remembered the impact to the side of his head, just below and behind his ear, how it had staggered him, weakened him, and so, invited the next inevitable blow. He remembered falling flat, no longer seeing the fists, even though they continued to thud down into his chest and abdomen. All he could remember was that exultant, savagely smiling face. A familiar face. He could not recall the name that went with it, but he was sure of its identity: one of Akim Al-Aftal’s guards and—sometimes—deliverer of Conrad von Harrer’s increasingly sparse measures of opium.

  Opium. Merely thinking of the word sent a burning through his muscles. But suddenly, the familiar craving for the pungent smoke Conrad loved and hated became an abrupt muscular contraction which triggered a parallel but even more intense mental reaction. It was as if the world was folding in upon him, and he upon himself, that there was some tiny, dense particle that he was destined to shrink down to, and when he did—

  Implosion. Sudden sweat and rage brought Conrad up into a sitting position, panting and homicidal. The transition had been so abrupt that he could not recall how or even why his current emotional state had arisen from the sensation of suffocating diminution that had preceded it. But he knew this much: this was not an effect of opium.

  Opium let you float. If anything, its greatest threat was in its seductive lassitude, in the loss of energy and will. But this reaction: this was new and wholly unpleasant. And it stripped away the last, if perverse, shred of dignity that von Harrer had carried north into Egypt, out of the hell holes that Cecil Rhodes’ Company troops had made of the Boers’ cities and the camps of their German and Austrian allies. Conrad had clung to one, last, simple dignity: the power to elect how he would leave this world. Aided by opium, at least he could elude the incessant sleeping—and waking—nightmares of carnage, and ultimately die in a time and a manner of his own choosing.

  But this new sensation—whatever it was, whatever it came from—seemed certain to steal even that. This was not the soothing miasmas of opiated forgetfulness he had sought and in which he had taken grateful refuge. This was a usurpation of his will and his body that was not only intense, but that threatened to make him an agent of indiscriminate violence.

  Von Harrer felt sweat cooling on his back as heat started building along his brow: a spark of humiliation that flared into a full-blown conflagration. Since this wasn’t a side effect of opium, the only reasonable conjecture was that Al-Aftal’s jackals had slipped something else into the tarry wads he had bought from them. There were drugs—the names of which were only whispered—that were rumored to spawn dependencies as violent as they were intense. Instead of inducing a blissful torpor, they made their victims mad dogs, animals desperate for the very toxin that would kill them in the end. Is that what Al-Aftal had done—slipped some measure of such a drug into the opium?

  Von Harrer felt his hands grow cold, the way they had before the midnight attacks on Lord
Roberts’ redoubts outside of Port Elizabeth: not only did the bastards beat me and take the last of my money once I had bought the opium, they slipped a poison into it as well. Conrad felt his teeth grinding: he had only wanted to buy forgetfulness at an honest price, but in Cairo, even that simple hope had been insipidly naive. Al-Aftal’s street jackals had not acted spontaneously. It was clear, in hindsight, that they had waited for the opium to do its slow, steady work. He could now remember how they had increasingly observed him with the same unhurried, seldom-blinking stare of vultures watching a man reeling in the desert. Except in his case, he had begun reeling from want of opium.

  Opium. Reflex turned his head toward his battered wooden night table. Resting on the stained top, a cracked and yellowed meerschaum imp adorned the Hungarian-made bowl he had purchased for his well-worn opium pipe. His two eyes locked on the imp’s. If only he could outstare it, then he could reject it. But the meerschaum imp was like the opium; the more one tried to defy it, the more one realized that there was nothing to defy except oneself. It was a game, the type a child plays when trying to trick its own reflection in a mirror.

  A honey-thick torpor overcame him while his gaze was still fixed on the pipe. Time passed and the difference between seconds and minutes—or hours—became indistinct, meaningless. He watched as the imp’s face lost its yellowish glaze, deepened to a dim orange as the sun began to set. The laughing eyes still glared upward: puckish, sardonic, leering. A leer like those worn by the fire-bleached skulls outside Mafeking, Kimberley, and in the ruins of Johannesburg; leers which evoked no mirth, only oblivion.