War Maid's Choice (ARC)

517 Pages·2016·2.32 MB·English

by  Weber David

War Maid’s Choice-ARC
David Weber
Advance Reader Copy
Unproofed
Baen
Baen Books by David Weber
Honorverse Novels:
On Basilisk Station
The Honor of the Queen
The Short Victorious War
Field of Dishonor
Flag in Exile
Honor Among Enemies
In Enemy Hands
Echoes of Honor
Ashes of Victory
War of Honor
At All Costs
Mission of Honor
Crown of Slaves (with Eric Flint)
Torch of Freedom (with Eric Flint)
The Shadow of Saganami
Storm from the Shadows
A Rising Thunder
Honorverse Anthologies:
More than Honor
Worlds of Honor
Changer of Worlds
The Service of the Sword
In Fire Forged
Honorverse Young Adult Novel:
A Beautiful Friendship
Fire Season (forthcoming)
Empire from the Ashes
Mutineers’ Moon
The Armageddon Inheritance
Heirs of Empire
Empire from the Ashes (omnibus)
Path of the Fury
In Fury Born
The Apocalypse Troll
The Excalibur Alternative Oath of Swords
The War God’s Own
Wind Rider’s Oath
War Maid’s Own
With Steve White
Insurrection
Crusade
In Death Ground
The Shiva Option
The Stars at War I
The Stars at War II
With John Ringo
March Upcountry
March to the Sea
March to the Stars
We Few
With Eric Flint
1633
1634: The Baltic War
With Linda Evans
Hell’s Gate
Hell Hath No Fury
WAR MAID’S CHOICE
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 © 2012 by Words of Weber, Inc.
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: 978-1-4516-3835-6
Cover art by Dominic Harman
First printing, July2012
Distributed by Simon & Schuster
1230 Avenue of the Americas
New York, NY 10020
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
tk
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
Printed in the United States of America
Prologue
Cables of blue-white lightning, tangled with knots of livid green, streaked down
the ebon heavens, crashing to earth in a coruscating circle around the
stupendous, many-turreted structure. The shortest of those turrets towered
hundreds of feet above the endless, smooth pavement stretching away in every
direction as far as any mortal eye might have seen, and the glare of lightning
danced and glittered from the mirror smooth obsidian of which the enormous
palace had been built. Or formed, perhaps. There were no tool marks, no lines
between blocks of masonry, on that titanic façade, and the light—such as it was
—that glowed from its narrow window slits was a pestilential green, less
brilliant than the corruption of that lightning yet more sullen, more...poisonous.
Fresh lightning hammered down, replenishing the glaring circle, feeding it,
keeping it alive while thunder echoed and rolled and bellowed. Each braided
strand lit the purple-bellied clouds from within, momentarily etching their
swirling depths upon the eye, and strange, unclean shapes flew in those briefly
illuminated deeps. One of those shapes plummeted from the clouds, sweeping
lower, riding through the chinks of darkness between the lightning’s pickets.
Larger it grew, and larger, insectlike head armed with brutal pincers, enormous
bat wings and mighty talons throwing back the glare of lightning until it seemed
gilded in the eye-tearing fury of the seething heavens.
At the very last moment it flared its wings and settled upon the balcony of the
very highest turret, a thousand feet and more above the lightning-crowned
pavement. The size of that obsidian palace dwarfed even its stature, and a rider
stepped from its back to the balcony and disappeared within.
More lightning sizzled and howled out of the darkness, smashing into the
earth with redoubled ferocity, bolt following bolt, driving that circle of fury
higher and brighter as if that flying shape’s arrival had been a signal, and
perhaps it had.
*
The throne room was impossibly vast.
It couldn’t possibly have been as large as it seemed, and yet it was. In some
way no mortal could have described, it was vaster than whole worlds and yet
small enough the purple-cloaked figure which swept into it could cross it in no
more than a dozen strides, and a strange perfume—sweet and seductive, yet
undergirt by the scent of something long dead—drifted on its air. The newcomer
ignored the six others who had been gathered there, awaiting his arrival. He
stalked past them, ascending the high throne against the huge chamber’s rear
wall and seated himself, and the wan, green radiance which had filled the room
flared abruptly higher and brighter as he sat. A nimbus of deadly green fire
hissed above his hooded head, and balls of the same lurid radiance crackled into
existence high overhead, dancing and swirling beneath the soaring, vaulted
ceiling like lost galaxies trapped in the throne room’s miasma of incense.
Like the palace itself, the throne was a single, seamlessly extruded
outcropping of obsidian, but this obsidian was veined with gold, and its surface
glittered with diamonds, emeralds, and precious gems. The arms ended in carven
demon’s faces, each encrusted with more gold, more gems, and each held a
mangled, dismembered body in its fangs. Rubies dripped from their jaws in
glittering, lovingly detailed streams of blood, and a huge, haughty face looked
down from the wall above the throne, etched across the stone in bas-relief and
glittering with still more gold. As the figure seated upon the throne threw back
the hood of his cloak, the face which was revealed matched that upon the wall.
Phrobus Orfro, once the seventh son of Orr All-Father and Kontifrio, gazed
down upon his chosen mate and their children, and his expression was not a
happy one.
“I wonder, sometimes, which of you is the least competent,” he said abruptly.
“The competition is so fierce I can’t make up my mind between you.”
His voice was deep, beautifully modulated, yet something seemed to scream
somewhere inside those resonant, perfectly articulated tones, and only one of the
six beings gathered before him returned his glare levelly. Krashnark Phrofro
stood with square shoulders, arms crossed, refusing to cringe, and Phrobus’ eyes
glittered. Yet he let the defiance—if such it was—pass. Krashnark was the
strongest of his children, the only one who might have openly challenged his
own position, but there was scant fear of that. Not from Krashnark. There was no
lack of ambition or surfeit of mercy in his second son, and he was the most
powerful of all of Phrobus children. Yet that strength was hobbled by his
perverse, inner code of honor. He neither gave nor asked quarter, but his oath
was unbreakable, which was why Phrobus felt no fear of Krashnark’s rebellion,
for he had sworn fealty to his father. It was unthinkable that he might raise his
hand against Phrobus after swearing that oath...and none of the others, not even
—or perhaps especially—Shīgū would ever have dared.
“All of you know the stakes for which we play,” he continued, “yet none of
you seems capable of accomplishing even the simplest task.”
“In fairness, Father,” one of his other children said, raising her head and using
one hand to draw glorious red hair back from her face to reveal pupil-less eyes
as black as his throne’s obsidian, “that isn’t precisely correct. Things have
gone...poorly in several universes. That’s unfortunately true, but we’ve
succeeded in others.”
Her voice was calm, respectful, yet pointed, and Phrobus gritted his teeth.
Carnadosa was his youngest child, and although she’d been careful not to say it,
many of those other successes had been her doing—a point she obviously wasn’t
above making by not making it. Yet not even a god or a goddess could deal with
all the possible alternative realities of every potential universe. There had to be
some division of labor, and in all too many of those realities which Carnadosa—
and Krashnark—had not overseen, Phrobus’ plans had failed catastrophically.
He could feel his other children’s, and his wife’s, hatred seething like the
lightning outside his palace as they glared at Carnadosa for underlining their
failures, yet they dared not speak.
“Yes,” he said after a moment. “We have succeeded in some, but we’ve failed
in far too many others. We can afford no more losses, especially in those where
victory had seemed within our grasp. Too much hangs on what happens there,
which is the reason your accursed uncle is striving hard to snatch them back
from us, yet none of you seem capable of stopping him. I’ve looked into the
future, Carnadosa. If we fail to stop this slide of events in the Light’s favor, if
Tomanāk’s successes continue, our power—the power of all of us—may suffer
catastrophic damage.”
He paused, letting the implications sink into all of his listeners. It wasn’t as if
they shouldn’t have been able to figure out for themselves just how dire their
situation might become, but sometimes they needed to be shaken by the scruff of
their collective necks before they could step back from their plotting and mutual
betrayals long enough to really think about the nature of their struggle with the
Gods of Light.
He leaned back in his throne, glaring down at them, his own thoughts running
back over the ages since his failed rebellion against his own father. It was his
brother’s fault, he told himself once more, thunder rolling outside the palace in
echo of his inner rage. It had been Tomanāk who’d rallied the others after the
devastating surprise of Phrobus’ initial attack. Tomanāk who’d personally struck
Phrobus down, taken his original name from him and given him the one he bore
now. “Truth Bender,” that was what his name meant, and in the depth of his
defeat, he’d been unable to reject it when his brother fastened it upon him
forever. Not even he now remembered what his name had once been, and he
thought perhaps he hated Tomanāk most of all for that.
Yet much as he hated—and feared—Tomanāk, he hated the myriad worlds of
mortals even more.
His attempt to seize Orr’s power as his own had very nearly succeeded, but in
the moment in which Tomanāk ripped it back out of his grasp, that power had
fractured, broken into more pieces than even a god could count. Worse, each of
those pieces had taken on its own life, its own existence, and when that
happened, the fates of all the gods had become captive to those insignificant,
puny mites crawling about all of the worlds upon worlds which had spilled from
the riven, shattered power he’d hungered to make his own. A new concept had
come into existence in that moment—the concept of time. The concept of a
future...and an end. And not even the gods themselves were immune to it, able to
ignore the endless, steady trickle of years sliding one after another into the maw
of eternity. Yet worse still, far worse, was the intolerable discovery that those
ephemeral mortals held his fate in their hands.
In many ways, only the fragmenting of Orr’s power had preserved Phrobus’
own life, for there was no doubt what Tomanāk would have done with him if
only he could. But all of them were entrapped in the uncertain fate Phrobus had
unwittingly, unintentionally, created. Orr himself had been diminished,
weakened, stripped of his ability to command the tides of fate and left as captive
to those capricious mortals as Phrobus himself. The restoration of his power was
beyond his own reach, and neither the remaining Gods of Light nor Phrobus
could repair it for him. It must heal itself in the fullness of that mortal creation—
time.
But how would it heal itself? It had taken Phrobus centuries to realize the
question could even be asked, for no one had ever considered the possibility that
Orr’s power could be shattered, and so no one had ever considered what might
happen if it was. He knew how frustrated Tomanāk was that the cataclysmic
collision of so many potential alternate futures had prevented him from slaying
him for his treachery, yet Tomanāk had no choice. The death of a god, any god,
would have released far too much additional power, poured far too much
additional uncertainty into the shattered present and chaotic future of Orr’s
realm. And so Tomanāk had been forced to let him live, let him leave the home
from which he’d been cast for his crimes, let him carve out his own realm in the
broken confusion of too many realities.
And as he’d paced the confines of that lesser realm, contemplating the far
vaster one he’d held so tantalizingly within his fingers, it had come to him.
The entire universe—the original, un-shattered universe, his father’s great
creation—had broken with Orr’s power. It was as if a glass had been dropped
upon a stone floor, and the shattered bits and pieces had flown in every direction.
It had been impossible for anyone, even a god, to predict where any of them
might land, far less where all of them might end their bouncing journeys across
the stone. Now they lay scattered, tumbled into confused windrows without
rhyme or reason, separated from one another and yet longing on some deep,
fundamental level to become whole once more. To become one once again. And
as they lay, they could be gathered back up by the proper set of hands. They
could be...reassembled, put back together, and the hands which put them back
together would control what they became on the day that they were one once
more.
If he could reclaim them, gather enough of them together in the pattern of his
choosing, he could remake them not as a reflection and restoration of Orr’s
power, but of his own.
Of course, that infernal busybody Semkirk had reasoned it out before him, and
his accursed brothers and sisters—even that flighty fool Hirahim and that
pathetic simpleton Sorbus—had set themselves to restoring the broken bits and
pieces themselves. But there was a catch. Those bits and pieces had minds of
their own. They were...malleable. They could be shaped, convinced, seduced,
even taken, but only from within. In the end, they would choose their own fates
on the basis of their own decisions, and those choices—and only those choices—
would decide whose hands they came into in the fullness of time.
It was a race between him and his brothers and sisters, and so he’d taken to
himself a wife and begotten children of his own to aid him in the struggle. Even
with them, he was badly outnumbered, but not all of the Gods of Light were
equally suited to the nature of the struggle between them. And the most ironic
thing of all was that individual strength was of secondary importance, at best.
They were forced to contend for each reality separately, individually, and the
nature of the contest leveled the difference between their abilities. Any god could
have destroyed any single fragment of that broken power, yet none of them knew
how many fragments could be destroyed before the whole failed, and so none of
them dared to destroy any of them. They must confront one another within the
limits and constraints each individual mortal reality could endure, until that
reality reached its tipping point and fell as the possession of the Light...or of the
Dark.
And in the fullness of time, enough of those individual realities would fall to
one side to give that side possession of them all. Which meant, that despite his
failure all those ages ago, Phrobus might yet win all he’d sought.
But that could happen only if those mortals he loathed with all his being—
loathed because they ultimately held his fate in their hands—gave him that
victory. Fortunately, only a tiny fraction of them realized the prize for which the
gods truly contended, and their puny lifespans made most of them shortsighted
and easily duped. Many of them could scarcely wait to give themselves to him
and to his children, and his hatred for them only made the taste of their souls still