Seas of Venus

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 © 2002 by David Drake.
Surface Action
copyright © 1990 by David Drake,
The Jungle
copyright © 1991 by David Drake.
All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book or portions thereof 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.

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)

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

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.