Freedom’s Choice
Authors: Anne McCaffrey
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for generations to come.”
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PRAISE FOR ANNE McCAFFREY'S FREEDOM SERIES
FREEDOM'S LANDING
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“There are enough problems and mysteries involved in establishing a colony to keep things interesting and to promise intriguing developments to come.”
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“Not for nothing do her fans call the author âthe Dragonlady'â¦Along the way she crafts a sci-fi adventure that will please followers of the genre and of the author.”
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FREEDOM'S CHALLENGE
“Another rousing episodeâ¦The action is fast-paced and riveting, and the charactersâhuman and of other speciesâare well limned and exhibit great individuality. McCaffrey continues to amaze with her ability to create disparate, well-realized worlds and to portray believable humans, convincing aliens of varied sorts, and credible interactions between them all. A very satisfying tale.”
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Booklist
“A saga of desperate courage and the desire for freedom.”
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Library Journal
Ace Books by Anne McCaffrey
The Tower and Hive Series
THE ROWAN
DAMIA
DAMIA'S CHILDREN
LYON'S PRIDE
THE TOWER AND THE HIVE
The Freedom Series
FREEDOM'S LANDING
FREEDOM'S CHOICE
FREEDOM'S CHALLENGE
FREEDOM'S RANSOM
FREEDOM'S
CHOICE
ANNE McCAFFREY
THE BERKLEY PUBLISHING GROUP
Published by the Penguin Group
Penguin Group (USA) Inc.
375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014, USA
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FREEDOM'S CHOICE
An Ace Book / published by arrangement with the author
Copyright © 1997 by Anne McCaffrey.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, scanned, or distributed in any printed or electronic form without permission. Please do not participate in or encourage piracy of copyrighted materials in violation of the author's rights. Purchase only authorized editions.
Ace Books are published by The Berkley Publishing Group.
ACE and the “A” design are trademarks of Penguin Group (USA) Inc.
For information, address: The Berkley Publishing Group,
a division of Penguin Group (USA) Inc.,
375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014.
eBook ISBN: 978-0-698-14382-1
PUBLISHING HISTORY
Ace/Putnam hardcover edition / 1997
Ace mass-market edition / June 1998
Cover art by Shane Rebedschied / Shannon Associates.
Cover design by Leslie Worrell.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental. The publisher does not have any control over and does not assume any responsibility for author or third-party websites or their content.
This book is affectionately
dedicated to Jan Regan,
who is more like Lessa than Lessa was.
Exercising racehorses is the nearest
thing to riding Dragons
on this good earth.
PREFACE
W
hen the Catteni, mercenaries for a race called Eosi, invaded Earth, they used their standard tactic of domination by landing in fifty cities across the planet and removing entire urban populations. These were distributed throughout the Catteni worlds and sold as slaves along with other conquered species.
Since slavery did not sit well with many of the first-world countries, the conquerors met with considerably more resistance than had been anticipated. The size and general brutality of the Catteni soldier had inculcated sufficient fear and obedience to inhibit active resistance on many of their previous invasions. However, since many M-type planets had been discovered by the Eosi, the Catteni were advised to round up dissidents and felons alike, deposit them on whatever M-type planet was currently available for occupation, and let them fend for themselves.
Not all M-type worlds are suitable for colonization but, since the Catteni had quantities of expendable personnel, they could use an empirical method of discovering which were fertile and friendly, and which contained
dangers making them inimical. A check was kept on the survival rate of the inadvertent settlers. If few remained alive, the world was abandoned. If the survival rate was high, more deliveries were made. When the imposed population had made the world tenable, the Catteni would install an overlord and exact a percentage of the gross planetary product. Any dissenters to this procedure were then rounded up and deposited on yet another potential colonial world.
Botany was one such colonial world on which the Catteni, emptying holdings cells on Barevi and Earth, dropped several species to see how they survivedâeach other as well as the native, but as yet unidentified, denizens. Humans, Deski, and Rugarians were the “colonists” in the first drop.
The Catteni outfitted each of the unsuspecting colonists with durable clothing, a blanket, and a packet of dry rations. The “shipment” spent the voyage in a form of suspended animation and were deposited on the planet along with knives, hatchets, and rudimentary medical kits.
On Botany, however, a former staff sergeant took charge of those dropped with him, and, warned by one of the nonhuman species, they managed to avoid the local avian predators.
Zainal, the one Catteni who had been shanghaied in that shipment, vaguely remembered other problems on this planet from a cursory reading of the original exploration report. Although some of the stranded people wanted to revenge themselves by taking the Catteni's life, Kris Bjornsen forestalled the attempt, suggesting that he knew more than anyone else did about the planet and they'd better keep him alive for a while. Sergeant Chuck Mitford saw the wisdom in that, and also took the Catteni's advice to seek higher, stonier ground if they wished to survive. In a forced march to the safety
of the nearby hills, Mitford realized that Zainal could be useful for quite a few reasons.
Establishing a base camp, hunting for edible life-forms and foods, occupied every one of the survivors under Mitford's command. The settlers discovered that this planet was not as unoccupied as the Catteni report suggested. In fact, it seemed to be a planet extensively farmed by mechanized, highly sophisticated machinery, operating without any “live” supervision. On a scouting mission, Kris Bjornsen and Zainal encountered more humans as well as representatives of the four other races dumped on Botany.
In order to save those of the Deski species from dying of malnutrition, since Botany did not produce one of their basic dietary requirements, Zainal forced a confrontation with the Catteni captain of a second transport dumping a new load of settlers. He also sent back the message that this planet was obviously an agricultural subsidiary of a heretofore undiscovered race.
Then he was summoned to a covert meeting with another Emassiâa high ranking Catteni officialâwith an offer to be returned to his rank and duties: an offer he summarily rejected.
By then, there were sufficient technicians and engineers available to redesign some of the available equipment into useful appliances and machines, supplying communications and other assistance to the settlers.
Using the aerial maps reluctantly supplied him, Zainal led a group to what might be a command center on the planet. However, it had obviously not been occupied for a very long time, though a garage held several aerial devices and smaller missiles of a homing device design. One of these was deliberately launched by Dick Aarens, in the hope that the actual “owners” of Botany might return and help the colonists against the Catteni.