John Dalmas - The Helverti Invasion

The Helverti Invasion

John Dalmas

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.

thereof in any form.

A Baen Books Original

Baen Publishing Enterprises

P.O. Box 1403

Riverdale, NY 10471

www.baen.com

ISBN: 0-7434-7169-5

Cover art by Bob Eggleton

Interior map by Randy Asplund

First printing, November 2003

Distributed by Simon & Schuster

1230 Avenue of the Americas

New York, NY 10020

Typeset by Bell Road Press, Sherwood, OR

Produced by Windhaven Press, Auburn, NH

Printed in the United States of America

This book is dedicated to

Ruth Beebe Hill and her Dakotah collaborator Chunksa Yuha, for her novel

Hanta Yo, a historically rooted epic of the Grizzly band of the Dakotah,

1794-1835

to

David Matheson, a Schee-chu-umsh traditional, raised on the Coeur

d'Alene reservation in a traditional family, for his novel of the pre-contact

Schee-chu-umsh

and to

Tony Hillerman, a white-eyes like myself, for his numerous novels of the

contemporary Navajo that have provided my wife and me with much

pleasure and many insights

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

My thanks to the following writers for critiquing this at one or another

stage of development: Jim Glass, Patty Briggs, Mary Jane Engh, Kathie

Healy, and Bob Lovely. And to the Spokane Word Weavers for listening

to, reading and critiquing a number of chapters.

BAEN BOOKS by JOHN DALMAS

The Lizard War

The Helverti Invasion

The Puppet Master

Soldiers

The Regiment

The White Regiment

The Regiment's War

The Three Cornered War

The Lion of Farside

The Bavarian Gate

Part One

ROOTS

Vision Quest

Trail-worn and half-starved, Mazeppa slipped through the undergrowth. His

face, body, limbs, recently shaved head, all bore what was left of medicine

paint. Its symbols were to help on his vision quest-a very unusual vision

quest-and only incidentally served as camouflage.

He was pursued by the shrieks of a blue jay in a giant silver maple. "Man!

Man! Man!" it shrieked. "Man! Man! Man!" Mazeppa ignored the racket,

and settled onto his belly beside a growth of red osier on the riverbank.

After a bit, when he failed to move again, the jay's clamor became erratic,

confused, as if the bird had forgotten what it was shouting about. Finally

the youth heard its departing wing beats. Somewhere on the terrace

behind and above him, a nest of baby robins renewed their querulous cries

for food. A parent began sharp, demanding chirps. A little later there was

the sound of wings again-one mate returning to the nest, the other

departing.

For a time, the only sound besides the peeping nestlings was the barely

perceptible murmur of the Misasip: the soft drag of its current along the

bank, the faint play of interweaving eddies and subcurrents. The youth's

empty belly no longer distracted him as it had the first days, and at a

subliminal level each sound registered. He heard it all, understood it all,

ignored it all. Had there been a hint of anything worrisome, it would have

caught his attention. Meanwhile he simply watched the great river.

Upstream on the far side, another sizeable river joined its waters to the

Misasip. At the juncture was an area of many structures, a walled town,

and rising within it on the high bank, a higher enclosure of stone, with

towers. Mazeppa knew of the great town, and of the towered enclosure

called Palace. When he was a little boy, a wandering storyteller had

stopped among the people and told of it.

Briefly Mazeppa examined it. Then, on the Misasip itself, a great raft

came into view, riding the current, a broad tent near its center. Men lay or

moved languidly about. On the stern a man stood holding a long pole that

trailed in the water, a very long paddle, Mazeppa realized, for steering. As

the raft passed, some hundred yards out, a long canoe overtook it from

behind, driven by twenty paddlers, their strokes slow and synchronized.

As it overtook the raft, men shouted back and forth. Briefly the raft's

steersman sculled as if to keep ahead, but after a few powerful strokes he

stopped, his cheerful call belying the fist he shook.

Shortly both craft disappeared downstream. Soon another great canoe

appeared, this one from the south, moving slowly upstream, its paddlers

digging more quickly, but still synchronized. It too had a tent near the

middle. It seemed to Mazeppa a great chief must lie in its shade, perhaps

napping. He watched it approach and pass. After a bit, it landed below the

enclosure's high stone walls, and men disembarked.

Leaving Mazeppa alone by the hypnotically murmuring river, sunlight

dazzling on its water. After an indeterminate time of near-trance, a voice

spoke to him, not in his ears but in his mind. He'd expected a voice, but

this one? It was, he realized, the voice of Jesus. "Mazeppa," it told him,

"someday you will rule all this, you and your people. All of it: the great

river and the land along it. Including the great town, and Palace, and all

they contain. It is what you were born for."

* * *

Then Mazeppa slept. When he awoke, the sun was behind him, low,

missing the water entirely, glowing gold on the treetops along the distant

bank. Where he lay, dusk was settling. Quietly he crept backward, away

from the shore, quietly got to his feet, and quietly returned to his tethered

pony, which had spent the day browsing the undergrowth within its reach.

Despite days of fasting, Mazeppa vaulted onto its back, ready to return

home, no longer a boy, a man now, his vision quest completed. He'd ride

west as he'd ridden east, following or paralleling the great trail the Sotans

had beaten in the earth with their comings and goings.

And mostly he would ride by night, for in this land he was the enemy. Ride

watchfully, listening, his nostrils reading the air, and not just for danger.

Because now his fast was over, and it was time to kill and eat. There

would be something: a porcupine feeding audibly in a treetop, the smell of

its careless evacuations rank in the still night air; or a beaver taking

advantage of the darkness, dragging a branch to a streambank. Then he

would dismount, string his bow, nock an arrow and wait, letting his eyes

find the target if they could. Wait till dawn if need be. And after he had

killed, thanked his prey and eaten, he would lie up in a thicket well away

from the Sotan trail, and sleep, to dream whatever after-dreams might

follow Jesus's message. Lie up till sunset. The moon would be halfway up

the eastern sky then, mostly full, and he could travel swiftly.

From Galactics 202

Studies in Cosmology

Parallel universes are not generated randomly or regularly. They result

when a sophont chooses, knowingly or not, between alternative actions of

sufficiently effective differences.

Like a stone thrown into a pond, the results of choice propagate outward

in what can be likened to a ripple effect. But unless the matric location is

suitably unstable and the initiating decision suits the circumstances, the

difference will not maintain itself against the tendency toward the

conservation of established universes. The separation does not

perpetuate, and only one of the two alternatives continues.

But if the changes are potent enough, "parallel" universes result, or

"divergent" universes, if you prefer. (We deal in metaphor here.) Neither

universe has any material trace of the other. However, the causal complex

persists for a considerable period as shadow events. Thus adepts, by

focusing on the divergence zone, can discern and penetrate the event

cloud. And with sufficient knowledge of pre-event conditions, can give

those perceptions context, and to a degree, identity. In fact, it is by

recording the deep-questioning of adepts that the following reconstruction

has been assembled.

* * *

In year 1983 of the Terran Common Era, in what we can call the stem

universe, a sequence of political events and posturing led to an American

naval task force holding exercises in the vicinity of Korea. Within weeks,

the government of the Soviet Union replied with a large-scale

demonstration of naval power within five hundred miles of the Hawaiian

Islands.

Given the experience of 1941, the American Pacific Fleet was sent out to

confront it: a response sufficiently threatening, it was misread as an

impending attack. Ordered by Soviet Pacific Fleet Command, the Soviet

force commander ordered a single tactical nuclear missile launched to

destroy the American flagship. However, the order was incorrectly

transmitted, and all his missile ships fired.

The Soviet admiral, appalled by the error, immediately notified Moscow. At

the same time, an American satellite monitoring the confrontation reported

this multi-missile launch, and the U.S. responded immediately with a

launch not only against the Soviet task force, but against naval shore

targets in the Soviet Far East.

The Soviet chief executive, Yuri V. Andropov, had acted almost as quickly.

Assuming the Americans would launch a wider-ranging nuclear response

than they actually did, he ordered an ICBM attack on numerous strategic

American targets. This massive launch was reported promptly, and the

Americans raised the ante "while they still could."

The critical mistransmission of the Soviet admiral's firing order resulted

from a choice made by the admiral's signalman-to covertly drink ethanol

on watch. It was the kind of choice made innumerable times at every

moment in every universe, but this one occurred at a time and place of

extreme pregnancy. The result was a space-time bifurcation, and two

resultant universes. In one, the drink was taken, in the other it wasn't.

In each, choices made during the next few minutes created a veritable

spray of incipient new universes. This seems to be characteristic in the

violent decline of sapient life forms. In the universe of interest here, which

we will call Universe Terra One, hundreds of fusion warheads exploded in

the atmosphere and on the surface. The possibility of such a war had

been foreseen. Scientists had predicted not only extensive shock wave

and radiation damage, but extensive urban, forest and grass fires; a

resulting major increase in albedo that would take years to decline to

pre-war normal; the effective destruction of planetary technical

infrastructures, including food production and transportation; enormous

direct and indirect human fatalities; and the collapse of law and order.

Their predictions, however, were not met. Instead, an unforeseen effect

resulted which still is not understood: a major imbalance in the local

sector of the underlying creativity matrix. Which was promptly adjusted by

the effective erasure of the still localized universe of the cataclysm, that is,

its morphing into one in which Terra differed from its precursor in some but

by no means all respects. In it, many effects of then-recent Terran history

disappeared, remaining only as more or less vague memories in the

surviving, ethnically redistributed sophonts. Sophonts confused not only

by the new and unexplainable world they found themselves in, but by

vague images of horrors in the spray of stillborn universes, horrors that

never quite happened.

This is the only known case of a reality matrix rebalancing itself in that

manner. Its study gave rise to whole new areas of research, and in time to

the cosmology that today we take for granted.

From the HOLY BIBLE

The Book of Renewal, Chapter 1

1 The second millennium had passed since the birth of the Redeemer, and

the Lord GOD looked at what man had wrought upon the Earth.

2 HE saw the waters and the air fouled, greed rewarded and virtue

scorned.

3 Liars were empowered, their voices entering every home, and their

pictures which moved with the semblance of life.

4 And the cities of man were beset with murderers and thieves, tempters

and corrupters.

5 Great armies there were, and fleets of warships that fared upon the sea

and beneath it, and there were other fleets that flew swiftly in the air. 6

Still other fleets flew above the air, and these were the most terrible, for

they had in them such power that a single one of them could destroy a

great city and all its people, and poison whole regions of the Earth.

7 And even as HE watched, GOD saw the armies of man move and clash

upon the Earth; the fleets on and under the seas destroyed each other;

and the fleets that flew in the air wrought havoc upon all they flew over.

8 Then those other fleets took flight which flew above the air. 9 And when

they came to earth, the walls of the cities fell as less than rubble; fire and

great winds reaped the people like mighty scythes; the sun was masked

with blood and the moon hid its face; days became like nights; myriad

were the dead, and loud the cries and lamentations.

10 And the Earth in its sorrow was cold beneath the pall of Death, so that

the corn did not grow; hay rotted in the windrows and potatoes in the

ground.

11 And the armies of man were without rule, sacking and killing, and the

children of man were without bread. 12 Pestilence and famine spread

across the face of the Earth, even pestilence that was sent not by GOD

but by the hand of man, so that few remained of man's multitudes. 13 And

bands of the wicked wandered the waste place the Earth had become,

murdering with knife and gun, bow and club, stealing bread from the widow

and blankets from her children, making slaves of them, and violating them.

14 And many men raised their faces to GOD, crying aloud for mercy, but

only a few there were who fell upon their knees, calling out to GOD that

they repented, and saying that all which had befallen them was just.

15 And among the Host of Heaven were those who spoke to GOD saying

that man was too iniquitous, that the time had come for the final judgment

and that the Earth should be cleared of man and all his works.

16 GOD listened to the hosts, but also HE listened to the supplications of

those men who were righteous. 17 And in His infinite mercy and His

infinite justice, GOD stopped for a space the passing of night and day on

Earth. 18 HE made the suffering and dying and life itself to pause and

wait, while HE renewed the Earth, recreating it. 19 And on the renewed

Earth HE left few works of man; simple tools whereby man could have

shelter and bread by the sweat of his brow.

20 For GOD did not return man to the paradise of Eden and the innocence

of the beginning. 21 Instead HE took the remnants of the nations of man

and divided them into small portions separate from one another in distant

places, mingling them, and caused them to forget their pride and their

shame, and much else. 22 And charged the Church to teach man to love

GOD and his fellow men.

from "Catechism for Cadets"

Commentary on Force and the Order,

Based on Certain Axioms of Saint Higuchi

As Saint Higuchi put it, "the Tao ensouled a suitable primate species here

on Earth to evolve out of barbarism in the direction of the angels." But

"given the nature and range of human variation, it is often necessary to

apply force." Which, acting with the authority of the Church, is the function

of our Order. The trick is to choose actions that offer high long-term

benefit-to-harm ratios for humankind.

With the corollary that we "wield no more force than necessary, drawing

no more notice than need be," while being "as honest and truthful as the

circumstances permit." Because "to deceive and defeat in a good cause

can be pleasurable and addictive."

That is an explicit part of the rationale behind our vows of temperance in

all things-including temperance in righteousness, and in temperance itself.

For "what is called 'righteousness,'" he wrote, "is too often

self-righteousness, which poisons decisions while providing a spurious

sense of superiority." Furthermore, humans can seldom comprehend true

righteousness, only suppositional righteousness, which the Saint, in his

11th Axiom, calls "a snare and a pitfall. Suppositional righteousness," he

went on, "was a serious contributor to Armageddon, and no doubt to most

of the earlier debacles in human history."

So said the Saint, whom Senior Operations Director Eskonsami Tahmm

has called a truly enlightened being by standards anywhere in the

Commonwealth of Homid Worlds. Higuchi-sama's 11th Axiom caused the

Cultural Oversight Bureau to adopt and support the Order, and the

External Security Secretariat to approve the establishment of the Sangre

de Cristo Academy....

* * *

In theory this is a straightforward partnership, and the best we're likely to

have on Terra until we've grown a lot, spiritually and philosophically, which

means for quite a while. Meanwhile we in the Order do the best we can,

which, based on performance, is rather good. Perfection is unavailable to

human beings (Axiom 5), or to any ensouled life form in the physical

universes. Except of course in the most basic sense, in which perfection

is unavoidable.

Certainly our principal weakness seems unavoidable, given the free-will

character that accompanies sapience in the known and implied universes.

For sapience (again according to the Saint) carries with it goals and

principles which differ among individuals, and cultures, and societies. And

looking beyond humankind, among life forms. Goals and principles which

inspire and empower conflicts as minor as what to serve for supper, and

as major as whether to destroy a world.

Love and compassion are our saving graces, but (again according to

Tahmm) they are not known to manifest sufficiently, in the physical

universes, to eliminate conflict. Nor are love and compassion enforceable.

Let me repeat that: Nor are they enforceable. Control is often necessary,

but it is at best a mechanism for coping, not for healing. Spiritual

evolution-with the consequent enlightenment-is the mechanism for healing.

-Kabibi Christian

Instructor

The Vicinity of Sol 9

GPV 1219-28-99206

The ship had begun as an express package carrier in the Borgith Sector.

After forty-seven years it was put up for sale, and through an intermediary

was bought by a Fohannid chaos cult that called itself "the Helverti."

The Helverti had the vessel modified as a yacht, and renamed it what best

translates as Satan's Delight, or The Delight of Chaos. For in Fohannid

mythology, the Evil Principle is personified as the Lord of Chaos.

Now, nearly four long hyperspace years from their home world, her skipper

watched the shuttle emerge from the Delight's shuttle lock. For a few

seconds the shuttle's navcomp read and analyzed the gravitic plexus, then

she disappeared into warp space with seven cult members.

With that, the Delight's skipper activated his gravdrive and took his ship

down to the dead, frozen surface of what, in a different universe, was

known as Charon. There, he and his crew-all but one-would take to their

stasis lockers. At the end of every shipsweek, the crewman on duty would

waken his or her replacement to stand watch, to monitor the automated

systems checks, as required by the owners and by prudence.

In not too many years, with a bit of luck, the owners would lift shuttle and

beam a signal to the ship, which would read it and waken the entire crew.

If there was no signal, eventually the ship would waken them without one,

and they'd be free to leave. For the Commonwealth's Cultural Oversight

Bureau would have monitors on Sol 3, and no one could guarantee a

successful mission. In fact, risk was an important part of the charm that

had drawn the Helverti so many parsecs from r'Fohann.

Another part of the charm was the indigenes. From all the Helverti could

learn-and they'd studied everything available and seemingly pertinent-the

indigenes themselves presented risks. Opportunities and risks.

A Message from God

Helverti Chief had scratched politely on the tipi flap. Mazeppa Tall Man's

junior wife, Trains Horses, had unfastened the flap and let him in.

Mazeppa gestured Helverti Chief to sit beside him, on a buffalo robe near

the fire. Trains Horses quickly refastened the flap, for autumn was well

advanced, and the day raw and windy. And cloudy, and the fire had burned

down to little more than embers. Much of what light there was in the tipi

entered through the smoke hole overhead.

When both men were seated, Mazeppa's senior wife added small pieces

of dry aspen to the fire.

Mazeppa was an imposing man, his wide shoulders muscular, arms long

and sinewy, hands large. His hair was sun-bleached, pale as straw on top,

his large mustache red-gold, and his eyes chestnut brown. From a rack

he took a pipe, not his long-stemmed ceremonial pipe, but of redstone

nonetheless, inviting serious talk. Filling its carved bowl with tobacco, he

tamped it, and using a wooden-handled trade spoon, lifted an ember from

the fire. Holding it to the bowl, he inhaled, a series of short kiss-like

inhalations. The resulting smoke was fragrant, even amidst the pungence

of burnt buffalo dung.

He held the pipe upward, offering it first to God, then to Helverti Chief, who

called himself Jorval. As always, Jorval took a single mouthful of smoke

and released it without inhaling. He'd learned earlier that his lungs and

throat did not tolerate such concentrated fumes; they'd nearly strangled

him.

For a long minute the chief smoked thoughtfully, seeming to ignore his

guest, who had thoughts of his own. Before leaving r'Fohann, Jorval had

viewed all the publicly available cubes that long ago survey scouts had

covertly recorded among the buffalo peoples. Solitary scouts, Fohanni like

himself because of their resemblance to humans. Faces depilated, they'd

posed as holy wanderers, staying a few days or perhaps weeks at a

camp, their physical oddities adding to their acceptance as holy.

The first Xiox survey team had arrived in post-Armageddon Year 14,

discovered the totally unexpected Shuffling, and created rough and ready

policies and procedures for anthropological studies. Since then, new,

better-prepared expeditions had been sent, first at thirty-year intervals.

Recorded on cube, the raw data, with commentaries and analyses, was

voluminous.

Jorval had begun by reading the written summaries, then formed a basic

project concept centered on the buffalo peoples of what once had been

called North America. Next, using illicit language cubes, he'd invested two

weeks on "forced learning" and drilling the Merkan language. Afterward he

reviewed the publicly available survey cubes on the buffalo people. Their

oral traditions were not particularly rich, and less perceptive than those of

the tribes who'd dwelt there before Armageddon. The indigenous tribal

survivors, more at home, and less traumatized and confused, had been

leaders in the recovery. This, along with the nature of the environment, had

inevitably caused the emerging new tribes to assume certain features. But

the "inshuffled" elements had been much more numerous, and arrived with

their own cultural inclinations. Thus, while the cultural similarities between

the traditional Dakotah and post-Armageddon Dkota were conspicuous,

the differences were significant.

Based on maps, Jorval had chosen the Dkota to work with; they'd seemed

the most suitably located. During the weeks since his first visit, he'd

enlarged and refined his knowledge, while carefully nurturing Mazeppa's

trust and friendship.

He had not, however, foreseen the tipi's smoky reek. It had bothered him

from the beginning, even though the tipi had not been buttoned shut on his

previous visits. And immunological wizardry, so important in interplanetary

commerce, didn't cover every allergy, every idio-sensitivity. So he

minimized his exposure by minimizing the time spent inside.

With a sharpened and feathered stick, Mazeppa dug the dottle from his

pipe and looked again at his guest. "The time of ponds freezing will soon

be upon us," he said, "and soon after that, winter. Then some of our bands

will move into soddies until the time of mud. Which will be a long time

from now."

"I have never experienced a Dkota winter," Jorval replied. "Perhaps you will

advise me."

John Dalmas - The Helverti Invasion

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