David Drake - Seas of Venus

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Seas of Venus

by David Drake

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.

in any form.

A Baen Books Original Omnibus

Baen Publishing Enterprises

P.O. Box 1403

Riverdale, NY 10471

www.baen.com

ISBN: 0-7434-3564-8

Cover art by Bob Eggleton

First printing, October 2002

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Drake, David.

Seas of Venus / by David Drake.

p. cm.

"A Baen Books original omnibus"—T.p. verso.

First unified publication of two previously published novels: Surface

action and

The jungle.

ISBN 0-7434-3564-8

1. Venus (Planet)—Fiction. 2. Life on other planets—Fiction. 3. Space

colonies— Fiction. I. Drake, David. Surface action. II. Drake, David.

Jungle. III. Title.

PS3554.R196 S43 2002

813'.54—dc21 2002026278

Distributed by Simon & Schuster

1230 Avenue of the Americas

New York, NY 10020

Production by Windhaven Press, Auburn, NH

Printed in the United States of America

The Venus Henry Kuttner and C.L. Moore described in Clash by Night and Fury

was among the most vivid creations to appear in Astounding Science Fiction

during the greatest years of that magazine. Here David Drake revisits their world

with two novels as colorful and imaginative as the originals.

SURFACE ACTION

Johnnie Gordon was born to wealth and privilege in the Keeps, but his whole life

has been dedicated to becoming a warrior of the Free Companies like his uncle.

Now his chance has come—but with it, a deadly struggle through hellish jungle to

steal the most powerful battleship in the enemy fleet. If Johnnie succeeds, then one

more duty awaits him: a duty that will haunt his nightmares forever. But if he fails,

Venus will die as surely as the atom-blasted Earth died; and Mankind will die also.

THE JUNGLE

Brainard's torpedoboat was in the wrong place at the wrong time when a salvo of

eight-inch shells landed. A few yards to the side and the blasts would've killed him

and his crew outright instead of flinging them ashore in their wrecked vessel.

Without a radio and on a planet where the winds make aircraft swift suicide,

they're dead anyway—unless they can cross the spine of an island through jungle

where every animal is a danger and the plants are even worse.

Brainard and his fellow Free Companions are hard men who've faced death in

battle, but now their enemy is a green Hell that wants not only to defeat but to

devour them . . . as it will some day devour all of Mankind—unless Brainard and

his crew survive, and unless they can turn the lessons they've learned in the jungle

against the even greater enemy that lurks in the Keeps themselves!

Hard-edged politics and combat written by a man who's seen both personally,

displayed in a lush setting created by two of the finest SF writers of all time!

AND A BONUS!

The author's travelogue of ten days among the real jungles, reefs and ancient

temples of Belize, told with the sharpness of observation and anecdote which have

made his fiction so vividly memorable.

BAEN BOOKS by DAVID DRAKE

RCN series

With the Lightnings

Lt. Leary, Commanding

Hammer's Slammers series

The Tank Lords

Caught in the Crossfire

The Butcher's Bill

The Sharp End

Paying the Piper

Independent Novels &

Collections

Seas of Venus

Foreign Legions

(created by David Drake)

Ranks of Bronze

Cross the Stars

The Dragon Lord

Birds of Prey

Northworld Trilogy

Redliners

Starliner

All the Way to the Gallows

The Belisarius series:

(with Eric Flint)

An Oblique Approach

In the Heart of Darkness

Destiny's Shield

Fortune's Stroke

The Tide of Victory

The General series:

The Forge,

with S.M. Stirling

The Chosen,

with S.M. Stirling

The Reformer,

with S.M. Stirling

The Tyrant, with Eric Flint

The Undesired Princess and The Enchanted Bunny

(with L. Sprague de Camp)

Lest Darkness Fall and To Bring the Light

(with L. Sprague de Camp)

Armageddon

(edited with

Billie Sue Mosiman)

Introduction: SEA STORIES

For my thirteenth birthday, my parents gave me a collection of SF (bought from a guy who

was entering the Navy) which included The Astounding Science Fiction Anthology. Among many

other great stories in the volume—it was John Campbell's own distillation of Golden Age SF,

after all—was Clash by Night by Lawrence O'Donnell.

It was years before I learned that Lawrence O'Donnell was a pseudonym of C.L. Moore and

her husband Henry Kuttner. Most O'Donnell stories were written primarily by Moore, but this

one seems to have been Kuttner's work in large measure. (After Kuttner's death, Moore renewed

the copyright in Kuttner's name alone.)

Details of authorship didn't matter to me when I was thirteen, and they don't matter a great

deal now: Clash by Night really blew me away. A writer is what he reads, and this story marked

me to a greater degree than I could've imagined at the time. (Well, at the time I couldn't have

imagined that I was going to be a professional writer. Even after twenty-odd years it seems pretty

strange.)

Kuttner and Moore wrote about mercenary soldiers of the future, basing the concept on the

Condottieri of Renaissance Italy. These bands were more romantic than most mercenaries (in part

because they didn't do a lot of hard fighting), and many writers, Kuttner and Moore included,

have emphasized the romantic aspect.

But the Condottieri were also businessmen—the name means contractor and is the same word

you'd use if you were hiring someone to build your house or to carry your goods from Venice to

Rome. In recognizing the business aspect of mercenary soldiering, Clash by Night from 1943 is

an order of magnitude ahead of most stories about mercenaries written either before or after it.

I jumped at the opportunity to get Clash by Night reprinted when Marty Greenberg suggested

I do a sequel to it for a series of double novels he was packaging. I wrote Surface Action as a

thematic sequel which could've been published in Astounding in 1943. In Kuttner and Moore's

story, a young soldier who thinks he wants to be a civilian comes to a realization about himself

and his world. In mine, a young civilian who thinks he wants to be a soldier reaches a similar

insight.

Surface Action didn't appear in the double series (the details are on my website for those who

want them) and was instead published separately. Because it didn't appear with Clash by Night I

made minor changes to the terminology, but it remains a direct response—and homage—to the

original. I then wrote The Jungle in order to get Clash by Night back in print.

Surface Action has a simple plot and a structure that would have fit in with the fiction

Astounding was publishing in the 1939-43 period (which I and many others consider the Golden

Age of Science Fiction). I don't like to repeat myself, so for The Jungle, I went to multiple

viewpoints and paired each segment of consecutive narrative with a flashback from the same

viewpoint but set at widely varying periods of the past. The structure is more complex even than

what I used on the much longer Northworld Trilogy. I'm happy with the way the experiment

worked out, but I've never tried to do anything like it again.

Writing a story always has an element of puzzle in it. These two novels had more than the

usual, because I was writing in someone else's universe and using assumptions current in 1940. I

doubt that Kuttner and Moore really believed in an ocean-covered Venus, but they could set their

story on one without explanation (and indeed, Isaac Asimov could do the same in 1955). Before I

could get on with my story, I needed to throw in terraforming and evolutionary developments

which are more colorful than probable.

My story is about people; about the way people feel and think and interact under stress. That's

the same subject that Kuttner and Moore addressed, and it's the focus of most of the fiction that

interests me.

The novels gave me scope for writing about the natural world—which in their case was

mostly my backyard writ large. I've never subscribed to the suburban dream of neatly manicured

lawns. Our present house is in the middle of a 15-acre meadow which we bushhog once or twice

a year to keep trees from taking over. At the time I wrote Surface Action and The Jungle we were

on a half-acre lot, but we'd deliberately allowed the back—where I wrote outdoors, using laptop

computers—to go feral if not exactly wild. This setting added immediacy to the descriptions of

hostile blackberries and honeysuckle. Once I had to wait before copying because a jumping

spider had crawled into the floppy drive and I didn't want a tragic accident.

As a whim—mine and Jim Baen's both—this volume also includes an account of my family

vacation in the rain forest of Belize. It's not my first experience of real jungles—that came in War

Zone C in 1970—but it's by far the more pleasant. Those of you who aren't interested in non-

fiction can ignore the travelogue, but those who read it will be able to recognize echoes in future

fiction of mine that touches in any way on jungles or lost cities. Based on my stories to date,

that'll be a pretty high percentage of my output.

My main consideration in writing both Surface Action and The Jungle was to get more people

to read Clash by Night. If you like what you read here, look for the original; I've reprinted it a

couple times myself, and I believe there's an on-line version available for a modest charge.

Having said that, these novels gave me great pleasure to write. I hope that some of the fun I

had will translate to pleasure for the readers.

Dave Drake

david-drake.com

Surface Action

For Mark L. Van Name

Who has made my life easier

as well as more interesting.

PROLOGUE

And we are here as on a darkling plain

Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight

Where ignorant armies clash by night.

—Matthew Arnold

Five hundred years before the first colony ship landed on Venus, an asteroid which had been

expanded into a fat nickel-iron balloon impacted with the upper Venerian atmosphere. There it

spread its filling of tailored bacteria to graze among the roiling hydrocarbons.

That was the start of the terraforming process.

Thousands of asteroid casings followed the first. All the early ones were loaded with bacteria

which broke down the poisons, forming free water through biochemical processes and creating

mulch as they died and their bodies drifted toward the surface.

The upper layers of the atmosphere cleared and no longer trapped the sun's heat. The blankets

of bacteria moved lower, following the hellish temperatures and poisonous hydrocarbons in

which alone they could exist.

Rain fell—and vaporized again, long before the huge lashing drops had reached the surface.

Furnace-hot layers of air cooled and cleared, and the rain continued to fall.

Even before the Venerian highlands rose above the remaining strata of hydrocarbon haze,

asteroids spewed seeds, spores, and Earth-standard one-celled life into the atmosphere. The new

cargoes spread and fell with the rain; and mostly died, but not quite all.

Men sent more asteroids filled with more life, and the life flourished.

The sheen of water-vapor clouds reflected the dangerous majority of sunlight from the

reformed planet, but the short, higher-energy end of the spectrum penetrated the clouds most

easily. The actinic rays aided mutation, and the virgin surface of the planet permitted adaptive

radiation on a scale never imaginable on Earth.

Asteroids strewed eggs; at first invertebrates, then those of backboned life forms, though none

so advanced that the young required parental care.

The colony ships arrived.

In a degree, the planners who seeded Venus with life had been too successful. Land and sea

both teemed with a savage parody of "Nature red in fang and claw."

The seas proved easier to colonize—"at first," the planners said, though the temporary

expedient quickly hardened to permanence. Domed cities sprang up on continental shelves a few

thousand feet down—beneath the sunlight and the light-driven violence of the surface layers, but

well above the scarcely less fierce competition in the deep trenches where all organic matter at

last settled.

Seven days, four hours, and thirty-four minutes after the last colony ship landed on Venus,

Earth's final war triggered a fusion reaction in her oceans. By astronomical standards, the

resulting star was both small and short-lived; but it would smolder for thousands of years, and its

first milliseconds had been enough to cleanse the planet of life.

Mankind survived in the domes of Venus.

Only in the domes of Venus.

The individual cities were independent and fiercely competitive, though the causes of their

conflicts had no more logic to those not involved than did the causes of men's wars through the

previous ages. Earth's blazing death throes imposed order of a kind on the wars of Venus, but not

even that warning trauma could bring peace.

Nuclear power and weapons were banned, as guns had been banned in Japan during the

Shogunate. The ban was enforced with absolute ruthlessness. Domed cities were vulnerable to

conventional weapons of the simplest sort. A dome which was believed to harbor nuclear

experiments was cracked so that water pressure crushed its inhabitants into the ooze before they

could drown.

Apart from that, war on Venus was fought on the surface, and by warriors.

Independent contractors, like the condottieri of Renaissance Italy, built bases and fleets with

private funding and staffed them with volunteers. They fought one another for hire, and in the

interim they fought the jungles for their very lives.

Domes went to war according to set rules. When battle and mercenaries' blood had decided

the point at issue, the losing city ransomed itself to penury. The winning dome recouped the cost

of the fleet it hired, and the winning military entrepreneurs collected a comfortable victory bonus.

The losing mercenaries had the amount of their original hire and whatever they had managed

to save from the wrack of defeat. That might be enough for them to go on to lesser contracts,

desperately trying to rebuild their fortunes; or they might be forced to merge with another

company on unfavorable terms.

Sometimes they merged with the fleet which had just defeated them. Business was business.

The fleets seemed a romantic alternative to life in the climate-controlled safety of the domed

cities. Civilians aped the dress and manners of the mercenaries or scorned them, but no one in the

domes could ignore fleet personnel in their uniforms and their dark-tanned skins.

There was no shortage of volunteers to take up the reality of the romantic challenge. . . .

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SeasofVenusbyDavidDrakeThisisaworkoffiction.Allthecharactersandeventsportrayedinthisbookarefictional,andanyresemblancetorealpeopleorincidentsispurelycoincidental.Copyright©2002byDavidDrake.SurfaceActioncopyright©1990byDavidDrake,TheJunglecopyright©1991byDavidDrake.Allrightsreserved,includingtheright...

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