The Buchanan Campaign Read online

  Title: THE BUCHANAN CAMPAIGN

  Author: Rick Shelley

  Series: Federation War Trilogy

  Book One

  If you purchased this book without a cover, you should be aware that this book is stolen property. It was reported as “unsold and destroyed” to the publisher, and neither the author nor the publisher has received any payment for this “stripped book.”

  This book is an Ace original edition, and has never been previously published.

  An Ace Book / published by arrangement with the author

  PRINTING HISTORY

  Ace edition / December 1995

  All rights reserved.

  Cover art by Chris Moore.

  This book may not be reproduced in whole or in part, by mimeograph or any other means, without permission.

  For information address: The Berkley Publishing Group,

  200 Madison Avenue, New York, NY 10016.

  ISBN: 0441002927

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  ACE and the “A” design are trademarks belonging to Charter Communications, Inc.

  PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA

  10 987654321

  Prologue

  As a member of the Buchanan Planetary Commission, Doug Weintraub was, in theory at least, one of the seven most important people on Buchanan. Since the total population of Buchanan was only thirtyseven thousand, theory didn’t count for much. Someday, the commission might be as grand as its name, but at present it was little more than a glorified town council. Like the other members of the commission, Doug put most of his working hours into the operation of his farm. A third of the farm’s output actually involved the cultivation of crops in soil. Apart from a few head of livestock, the rest came from nanotech food replicators.

  But Doug wasn’t working at three in the morning. He was hunting, something he did at least once a week, looking for the world’s tastiest native treat. The hippobary was also the largest native herbivore. Like the hippopotamus that gave it half its name, the hippobary was mostly aquatic, but came ashore at night to graze along the river that flanked Buchanan’s two towns, Sam and Max—the original colonists had been rather quixotic in many respects. Hunting hippobary wasn’t the safest pastime. An adult male might reach a thousand pounds. A female could top twelve hundred. Although they preferred the comfort of water to support their bulk, hippobary could move rapidly on land, and their short, curved tusks could kill a human. It had happened more than once in the 150 years that Buchanan had been settled.

  Doug had hunted hippobary since he was fourteen years old. He was good, careful. Part of his care was that he never went out until well after the middle of the night. By two or three in the morning, the hippobary would have eaten their fill. A full belly made them sluggish.

  Now in his midforties, Doug was tall, thin, and very fit. Working a farm by hand insured that. His face was weathered and deeply tanned. His hands were rough and calloused, with long, gaunt fingers. His sandybrown hair was beginning to go gray. His rifle was an antique, from the original stock brought to Buchanan with the first settlers, and patterned after a design that had originated on Earth a thousand years before. But the weapon was fully serviceable, and powerful enough for hippobary, and nightvision goggles let him see where to shoot.

  A path led from Doug’s backyard to the river. Wide and shallow over a soft bed, the river had never had any name other than the Muddy. Even at the flood, the Muddy rarely got deeper than eight feet. The marshy flood plains gave the water too much room to spread, away from Sam and Max.

  Two hundred feet from the river, Doug turned right and followed the edge of the marsh grasses. Every few steps, he stopped and scanned the area between him and the water. His goggles depended on available light, rather than infrared, but they were better than nothing and had the added attraction of local manufacture. Better equipment would have to be imported, and imports were prohibitively expensive.

  “I want a big one tonight, Doug told himself. He liked large portions of hippobary. The native meat was only partially digestible, partially nutritious for humans. “Half an hour and you’re hungry again” was the local complaint, which was usually coupled with “But that means you can eat more hippobary that much sooner.”

  A flash of light in the sky to Doug’s right distracted him. “Can’t be a meteor,” he mumbled, shaking his head. “Can’t be a transport shuttle either. There’s nothing due.” He would have heard of the arrival of an unscheduled ship within minutes of its arrival. “I’ll ask Hans in the morning,” he decided, turning his attention back to his hunt.

  Then a sonic boom disrupted the night. Doug looked up again, as two more streaks of light raced across the sky. After a few seconds, there were two more sonic booms.

  All thought of continuing the hunt ended. Doug started back toward home. He wanted to get on the complink and find out what was going on, which might not be easy in the middle of the night. Buchanan didn’t have a fullfledged starport. The landing field was manned only when a ship was expected, or when an unexpected ship radioed its arrival.

  Doug’s wife Elena was standing in the kitchen, looking out the back door, when he got home. “What’s going on?” she asked as soon as Doug reached the porch.

  “I don’t know. Anything on the net?”

  “I didn’t look. I wanted to see if you were around.”

  Doug hurried through the kitchen to his den, Elena following right behind. As soon as he got to the complink, Doug used his ID to set up a conference with the other six members of the commission. It took less than five minutes to get all of them on the net. The sonic booms had apparently awakened everyone.

  But no one knew what had caused the noises. With all seven commissioners trying to talk at once, any communication was difficult. One or another of the members occasionally broke away from the conference to make or take another call.

  An outbreak of small arms fire came almost simultaneously with news. “Federation troops have landed at the starport. They’re advancing toward both towns.” Sam and Max were little more than three miles apart, with the starport farther from the river, completing a roughly equilateral triangle with the towns.

  Thirty seconds later, Franz Bennelin was suddenly cut out of the conference hookup. The others caught a flash of military battledress before Bennelin’s complink went dead.

  “They’re coming for us,” one of the other commissioners said, and hands reached to disconnect the net conference.

  Doug swallowed hard as he broke his connection to the others. His hand was shaking.

  “What’s it all about?” Elena asked. She had seen and heard everything that he had.

  “Invasion.” Doug stood and gripped her arms hard. “Get Jamie. Both of you go down into the storm cellar and stay there until someone comes.”

  “Where are you going?” Elena asked.

  “No questions. There isn’t time. Just get Jamie and lock yourselves in the cellar. Now.”

  Elena wanted to argue, but the look on Doug’s face stopped her. “Be careful, dear,” she said. Then she went to get Jamie, the only one of their three children who still lived at home.

  Careful? There’s no time left for careful, Doug thought. War was one evil he never would have dreamed could come to Buchanan. An invasion by Federation troops? It was unthinkable, even as it happened.

  He looked around his den, then pulled open a drawer, took two boxes of cartridges for his rifle, and stuffed them into the oversized pockets of his hunting overalls. Going through the kitchen, he grabbed an empty canteen. He could fill it at the river. Elena and Jamie went through the kitchen and down into the storm cellar. Elena
looked terrified. Tenyearold Jamie seemed to be more asleep than awake.

  Doug slipped his nightvision goggles back in place, picked up his rifle, and went out the back door. He trotted across the yard to the barn. His plans were taking shape on the fly, his thoughts not fully coherent. The Federation attacked us. We need help. Only the Commonwealth can help us, if we can get word to them, if they choose to help.

  One thought led to the next. Communications were a problem. A radio appeal would take years to reach the nearest settled world. Buchanan had no ships capable of Qspace transits. There was only one possibility, and that was why Doug ran to his barn. There were three message rockets on Buchanan—small, highacceleration rockets that could transit Qspace. One of those might avoid interception. And one of those rockets was in Doug’s barn.

  If there’s time, he thought. If I can get it off before soldiers come for me. If it can elude whatever ships are in orbit. Too many “ifs.”

  The rocket had always been a nuisance. Twentysix feet long and fifteen inches thick, it took up too much room; it was, or always had been, useless. Custody of it was the major penalty of Doug’s membership in the commission. The rocket was at the back of his barn, near the second set of large double doors. He pulled the tarp off of the rocket and found the small programming module. There was no time for uncertainty. Doug had read through the instructions for the MRs when he was given responsibility for his. That alone wouldn’t have been enough if the programming module hadn’t provided constant help. He keyed in his commission ID as authorization, then had to key in the message. For security reasons, it couldn’t be done orally. Finally, he had to enter transit instructions. Those took time, as Doug had to navigate the computer’s system of menus one window at a time. He had never programmed one of these rockets before. No one on Buchanan had. They were an emergency device, something to use to signal extreme need when no other means was available. Like now.

  The message was simple: “Federation forces have invaded Buchanan and appear to be taking planetary commission members prisoner.” Doug programmed the rocket for Buckingham, the capital world of the Commonwealth. Flight instructions…

  Doug hesitated. He looked away from the rocker and listened for any hint of soldiers. There were only the familiar noises of the night. These rockets are supposed to get well away from any planet before they distort their way into Qspace, Doug reminded himself. It would take days for the MR to reach a normal transit point, with no guarantee, and little hope, that it would escape the attention of the invaders.

  “What happens if I program it to shift into Qspace right away?” Doug whispered. He couldn’t remember reading about that. What would transit in the neighborhood of a large mass do to the rocket? What would it do to the large mass? How dangerous would the distortions be?

  “I’m going to find out,” he mumbled, desperation overriding judgement. He programmed the rocket to transit five seconds after ignition. Then he rolled the rocket’s launch cradle over to the double doors, opened them, and pointed the rocket across the river. He gave himself a ninetysecond delay before ignition, and ran toward the path that led upstream, carrying the rocket’s programming module with him.

  Even if soldiers arrived before the rocket blasted off, they wouldn’t be able to stop the countdown.

  Maybe they could destroy the rocket with their personal weapons. Maybe they couldn’t.

  Doug ran as he hadn’t run in a decade. He felt the ache of lungs and heart pushed to unaccustomed effort. He wanted to be as far away from that rocket as possible when it tried to insert itself into Qspace. / hope Elena and Jamie stay in the storm cellar, he thought, but there was no time to go back to reinforce his warning.

  The flash of ignition was greater than Doug had expected. A cloud of fire and hot exhaust gasses ignited the barn even before the rocket started to slide up out of its cradle. Then the rocket sought Qspace.

  Doug had no way to be certain that it succeeded, but there was a shock wave, a distortion of local gravity, as the rocket opened a bubble of Qspace around it, forcing the air away, outward. There was a greater blast of fire than before, white and blue flames that started at the outside of the bubble and collapsed inward as the bubble disappeared. The shock of the rocket’s transit completed the destruction of the barn, blew out the fire that was consuming it, and sent out ripples that flattened the tall marsh grasses.

  The shock wave sent Doug flying to the ground, face first.

  After a minute or more, he picked himself up. He ached all over, but nothing seemed to be broken. He looked back toward his home. The house was still standing, though the roof had been damaged.

  He wanted to go back, but couldn’t. Even if Federation troops hadn’t been on their way before, the rocket launch would certainly draw them. His wife and son would be safe—he wouldn’t. Doug tossed down the programming module, turned away, and continued trotting along the path away from his home and the settlements. He wasn’t certain where he would go. Some five or six miles away, there was a string of low hills, and several caves. They would give him at least momentary safe haven.

  And time to think.

  Part 1

  1

  A fournote call from a bosun’s pipe sounded over speakers through His Majesty’s Starship Victoria.

  The traditional announcement, “Insertion into Qspace in thirty seconds,” followed, and every complink displayed a countdown. For a century, there had been no real need for the warning. In the early centuries of Qspace travel, it had been necessary to shut down a ship’s artificial gravity before making the transit to or from Qspace because the early Nilssen generators had been unable to support the power demands of both of their functions simultaneously. Current engines had no such difficulty. In addition, the dimensional translation was no longer accompanied by the gutwrenching sense of dislocation that the early generators had produced. But traditions died hard within the Royal Navy of the Second Commonwealth.

  Two thousand feet aft of the ship’s bridge, in one of the six dozen troop bays that occupied the bulk of the ship’s volume, Sergeant David Spencer of the First Battalion, Second Regiment of Royal Marines looked up from his inspection of the Intelligence and Reconnaissance (I&R) platoon to the nearest speaker when the bosun’s call sounded.

  “Third time pays for all,” David whispered after the announcement. After fifteen years in the Marines, David had lost count of his Qspace transits—well over a hundred.

  But this was the third transit of this particular voyage, the final jump.

  There were no noticeable feel to the ship’s translation to Qspace. Victoria’s navigator locked onto a pointmass dimensional complex. The ship’s Nilssen generators deformed the point and expanded the resulting sphere around HMS Victoria. David knew the rudiments of the theory, though the mathematics were beyond his imagination. During the jump, the ship existed in a virtually independent universe, a bubble whose diameter would be scarcely greater than the longest dimension of Victoria—slightly over five miles. Once inside Qspace, the ship would rotate until it was aimed at the proper exit point, and then transit back to normalspace. The amount of distortion forced on the sphere during the exit determined the normalspace distance covered during the jump. Properly plotted and executed, three Qspace transits could carry a ship to any point in the known reaches of the galaxy. Two snags kept Qspace transport from being effectively instantaneous between any two points. First, a ship had to climb away from the gravity well of a planet before making the first transit of a voyage. Second, ships had to make lengthy normalspace passages between Qspace transits, traveling away from their last jump points in normalspace until the last distortion ripples had damped out completely. That meant five days in normalspace before the first transit and three days after each jump. A captain in the Royal Navy didn’t cut corners, not if he or she wanted to retain that commission.

  Victoria’s journey home to Buckingham from Devereaux had been something of a lark for most of the troops. Their posting to Devereaux had
been long and boring. The first, second, and engineering battalions of the Second Regiment had spent nearly two years helping the new colonists stake out townships, build houses, clear forest, prune back the local predators—that sort of job. It hadn’t been proper military work, but it was work, and Marines had to be kept busy, if only to keep them out of mischief. But there had also been time for military training. The Royal Marines never passed up the opportunity to train their people on new terrain. Now the Second Regiment was going home, looking forward to catching up on overdue holiday leave and a little civilized debauchery. A colony in its first years had little to offer visiting military men—no pubs or dance halls, no unattached and available young women.

  Sergeant Spencer finished his inspection, then moved out into the cross aisle. “All right, lads. Do try to keep the area looking shipshape longer than thirty seconds. You’ve earned your free afternoon.

  Dismissed.”

  “Three more days,” Jacky White said, immediately dropping onto his bunk. The men chosen to serve in the I&R platoons tended to be rather below average in height and weight. Stealth was an important weapon for them. But Jacky was slightly shorter than average, even for the I&R. Fully dressed, he looked slight, no particular threat to anyone. But there was a wiry, muscular body hidden beneath those clothes, and the bland face concealed the mind of a proficient infantryman. “Three days to home and then it’s civie street for me. Bloody time too. My enlistment was up six weeks ago.”

  “You’re not a civilian yet, White,” Spencer said. “You know the drill, ‘Enlistment continued for the Good of the Service.’ “

  “Aw, c’mon, Sergeant,” Jacky said, laughing. “You mean, ‘enlistment continued because the RM are too cheap to provide special transport home.’ “

  “As you will.” Spencer held back his smile until he turned away from Jacky. His face was so weathered that his men sometimes said that his smile could start babies crying. “Mind, you’ve had your lark. I haven’t had a decent day’s work out of you in longer than six weeks.”