The Reaches

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.
Introduction copyright © 2004 by David Drake;
Igniting the Reaches
copyright © 1994;
Through the Breach
copyright © 1995;
Fireships
copyright © 1996; all by David Drake.
All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book or portions thereof in any form.
A Baen Megabook
Baen Publishing Enterprises
P.O. Box 1403
Riverdale, NY 10471
www.baen.com
ISBN: 0-7434-7177-6
Cover art by Stephen Hickman
First omnibus hardcover printing, January 2004
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Drake, David.

The reaches / David Drake.
p. cm.
"A Baen Megabook."
ISBN 0-7434-7177-6
1. Interplanetary voyages--Fiction. 2. Life on other
planets--Fiction. 3. Space ships--Fiction. I. Title.

PS3554.R196R425 2004
813'.54--dc22
2003020725
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 RCN Series
 

With the Lightnings
Lt. Leary, Commanding 
The Far Side of the Stars

The General Series
 

Warlord
with S.M. Stirling (omnibus)
Conqueror
with S.M.Stirling (omnibus)
The Chosen
with S.M. Stirling
The Reformer
with S.M. Stirling
The Tyrant
with Eric Flint

Hammer's Slammers
 

The Tank Lords
Caught in the Crossfire
The Butcher's Bill
The Sharp End
Paying the Piper

The Belisarius Series
with Eric Flint
 

An Oblique Approach
In the Heart of Darkness
Destiny's Shield
Fortune's Stroke
The Tide of Victory

Independent Novels and Collections
 

The Reaches Trilogy
Seas of Venus
Foriegn Legions,
edited 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
Grimmer Than Hell
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)
Killer
(with Karl Edward Wagner)

I'm a very organized writer—insanely organized, one might say, and we'll get back to that in a moment. I take extensive notes before I start plotting, and I do very detailed plots (usually in the range of 5–15,000 words per plot, though a few have been much longer).

Occasionally I hear a writer say something along the lines of "My hero went off in a direction I didn't expect." I shake my head:
my
heroes don't do anything of the sort. It turned out, however, that they could still surprise me.

I got the notion of using the Age of Discovery as the background for a series of space operas. I'd bought a set (eight volumes) of Hakluyt's
Voyages
(the 1598 edition, which adds a great deal of material but drops David Ingram's very interesting account from the 1589 edition) while I was still an undergraduate and dipped into it frequently. When I chose that world for my setting, I read and took notes of the whole work. I then started plotting.

The life of Francis, later Sir Francis, Drake lent itself to development into a trilogy: his first voyages to the Caribbean, which made him an enemy of Spain and gained him a name; the round the world voyage of 1580–1, which brought him great wealth and a knighthood; and finally the climactic struggle against the Armada. I actually followed Drake's life quite closely, but especially in the second book I wove in events which happened to some of his contemporaries.

Though Drake was my model, I didn't attempt to tell the stories from his viewpoint. He's a very attractive man in many ways. His luck was in great measure the result of careful planning. For example, he didn't lose a man to scurvy, the deficiency disease which nearly wiped out Magellan's crew during the only round the world voyage preceding Drake's. Anson, a century and a half later, was still losing large numbers of crewmen to scurvy. Drake had figured out something that the greatest navigators before and after him did not, to their great cost.

Furthermore, in a cruel age and under brutal conditions, Drake wasn't himself cruel and didn't allow those under him to practice cruelty. This is truly remarkable, more remarkable than readers who haven't been in hard places themselves can imagine. Drake, suffering a painful wound from an Indian ambush, prevented his men from bombarding the Indian village. He said, probably correctly, that the Indians mistook him for a Spaniard—but the man who could do that after an arrow has been pulled from his face was humane in the best sense of the word.

But.

Drake was a religious fanatic and a fanatical patriot. He had sufficient reason—Philip II of Spain was a tyrant from the same mold as later provided the world with Hitler—and Drake's behavior was almost invariably within what now are accepted civilized norms. (The one instance of a war crime in modern terms involved hanging a hostage priest and promising to hang more if the Spaniard who'd murdered an envoy under a white flag weren't surrendered for punishment.)

But if what Drake did is acceptable, what he
was
is not. I don't say that I couldn't get into the mind of a fanatic, but the world and
my
world wouldn't be better places if I did so. I told the story—the stories—from the point of view of fictional sidekicks who, though men of their times, took a detached attitude toward the great issues of their day. Men, in short, who weren't very different from me.

I won't say that was a mistake, but I think it
is
the reason that the wheels came off my careful plan. Those viewpoint characters turned out to have minds of their own: my mind. And as a result, the novels weren't at all what I'd intended them to be.

That's the background to
The Reaches
. I'll now offer three . . . well, call them caveats regarding the books themselves.

1) I postulated a future in which war had brought Mankind to the brink of extinction. The civilization that returns is based on individual craftsmanship, not mass production (although that's clearly on its way back by the end of the series). Some readers, faced with stories in which the characters fly starships but fight (some of them) with single-shot rifles, were not only baffled but infuriated.
2) Though I didn't use ideologues for my viewpoint characters, the period itself was fiercely ideological. I didn't attempt to hide that reality by inventing characters with modern sensibilities to exclaim with horror at situations which everyone of the day took for granted. Thus the books are deeply steeped in ideology that readers may find not only foreign but distasteful.
3) Finally, I'd intended
The Reaches
to be light space opera, the sort of thing I later did in the RCN series. Space opera they are, but they're very hard,
harsh
books.
Through
the Breach
in particular is a more realistic view of what war does to a citizen/soldier than
Redliners
was. I'm more self-aware now than I was when I wrote the series, but I'm honestly not sure whether more than chance was involved in my choosing to write
Through the Breach
in first person, which is nearly unique in my fiction.

There's no single Truth in my world, but there are lots of little truths. There are several of those woven into
The Reaches
, but they're not all of them the truths that make me happiest in the hours before dawn.

Dave Drake
david-drake.com

Piet Ricimer stood out like an open flame on the crowded, cluttered bridge of the
Sultan
as she orbited Salute. Stephen Gregg was amused by the young officer's flashy dress.

Well, Ricimer was no younger than Gregg himself—but Gregg, as a member of a factorial family, was mature in ways that no sailor would ever be. More sophisticated, at any rate. Realizing that sophistication and maturity might not be the same made Gregg frown for a moment until he focused on the discussion again.

"I suppose it
might
be Salute," mumbled Bivens, the navigator. Gregg had already marked Bivens down as a man who never saw a planetfall he liked—or was sure he could identify.

"Look, of course it's Salute!" insisted Captain Choransky, commander of the
Sultan
and the other two ships of the argosy. "It's just this tub's lousy optics that makes it hard to tell."

His vehemence made the landfall seem as doubtful as Bivens' concern had done. This was Gregg's first voyage off Venus, much less out of the solar system. He was too young at twenty-two Earth years to worry much about it, but he wondered at the back of his mind whether this lot would be able to find their way home.

Besides the officers, three crewmen sat at the workstations controlling the forward band of attitude jets. The
Sultan
had been stretched by two hull sections after her first decade of service as an intrasystem trader. That had required adding another band of jets.

The new controls and the sprawl of conduits feeding them had been placed on the bridge. They made it difficult for a landsman like Gregg to walk there under normal 1-g acceleration without tripping or bruising himself against a hip-high projection. Now, with the flagship floating in orbit, Gregg had even worse problems. The spacers slid easily along.

The most reassuring thing about the situation was the expression of utter boredom worn by every one of the crewmen on the control boards. They were experienced, and they saw no reason for concern.

"Sir," said Ricimer, "I'll take the cutter down and find us a landing site. This is Salute. I've checked the star plots myself."

"Can't be sure of a plot with these optics," Bivens muttered. "Maybe the
Dove
got a better sighting than I could."

"I'll take the six men who came with me when I sold
The Judge,
" Ricimer said brightly. "I'm pretty sure I've spotted two Southern compounds, and there are scores of Molt cities for sure."

Ricimer was a short man, dark where Gregg was fair. Though willing to be critical, Gregg admitted that the spacer was good-looking, with regular features and a waist that nipped in beneath powerful shoulders. Ricimer wore a tunic of naturally red fibers from somewhere outside the solar system, and his large St. Christopher medal hung from a strand of glittering crystals that were more showy than valuable.

"Might not even be Molts here if it isn't Salute," Bivens said. "Between the twenty-third and twenty-ninth transits, I think we went off track."

Choransky turned, probably as much to get away from his navigator as for a positive purpose, and said, "All right, Ricimer, take the cutter down. But don't lose her, and
don't
con me into some needle farm that won't give me a hundred meters of smooth ground. The
Sultan
's no featherboat, remember."

"Aye-aye, sir!" Ricimer said with another of his brilliant smiles.

"I'd like to go down with the boat," Gregg said, as much to his own surprise as anyone else's.

That drew the interest of the other men on the bridge, even the common sailors. Piet Ricimer's face went as blank as a bulkhead.

Gregg anchored himself firmly to the underside of a workstation with his left hand. "I'm Stephen Gregg," he said. "I'm traveling as supercargo for my uncle, Gregg of Weyston."

"I know that," Ricimer said, with no more expression in his voice than his face held.

"Ah—Ricimer," Captain Choransky said nervously. "Factor Gregg is quite a major investor in this voyage."

"I know that too," Ricimer said. His eyes continued to appraise Gregg. In a tone of challenge, he went on, "Can you handle a boat in an atmosphere, then, Gregg?"

Gregg sniffed. "I can't handle a boat anywhere," he said flatly. "But I'm colonel of the Eryx battalion of the militia, and I'm as good a gunman as anybody aboard
this
ship."

Ricimer's smile spread again. "Yeah," he said, "that might be useful."

He reached out his hand to shake Gregg's. When he saw the landsman was afraid to seem awkward in reaching to take it, Ricimer slid closer. He moved as smoothly as a feather in the breeze. Ricimer's grip was firm, but he didn't make the mistake of trying to crush Gregg's hand to prove that he was as strong as the bigger man.

"Maybe," Ricimer added over his shoulder as he led Gregg out through the bridge hatch, "we can give you some hands-on with the boat as well."