Tom Paine Maru - Special Author's Edition

TOM PAINE MARU

L. Neil Smith

Phoenix Pick

an imprint of Arc Manor, LLC

Rockville, Maryland

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Tom Paine Maru
copyright © 1984, 2005 (revised), 2009 L. Neil Smith.
All rights reserved. This book may not be copied or reproduced, in whole or in part, by any means, electronic, mechanical or otherwise without written permission from the publisher except by a reviewer who may quote brief passages in a review. Cover copyright © 2009 Arc Manor, LLC
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Manufactured in the United States of America. Originally published by Balantine Books (Del Rey), August 1984.

Tarikian, TARK Classic Fiction, Arc Manor, Arc Manor Classic Reprints, Phoenix Pick and logos associated with those imprints are trademarks or registered trademarks of Arc Manor Publishers, Rockville, Maryland. All other trademarks and trademarked names are properties of their respective owners.

This book is presented as is, without any warranties (implied or otherwise) as to the accuracy of the production, text or translation.

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PRINT EDITION ISBN: 978-1-60450-260-2

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Great Science Ficstion at Great Prices

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For Cathy, my Butterfly Princess

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A WORD FROM THE AUTHOR

Tom Paine Maru
was intended to be my first “big” novel, with twists, subplots, otherwise admirable characters working to cross purposes, and all that there kinda literary stuff. It also contained my ideas about why so many people struggle to gain and keep power, and why others (or sometimes even the same people) bow down to it. I also tried to make sure that it had “enough sex and violence to satisfy even the most apolitical reader”, but the book was badly cut by its first publisher, and languished until it fell out of print.

For a short time, after a kind friend painfully extracted it from WordStar 3.0 for CP/M in which I’d written it, I tried to make it available to readers through my website as an e-book, but that never really quite worked out. To proclaim I’m delighted that it’s now being offered by Arc Manor would be an understatement.

So here’s
Tom Paine Maru
, fully restored to the novel I meant it to be, and readers may judge for themselves whether my theories encumber or enhance it. I only hope that they enjoy reading it as much as I enjoy seeing it in print again.

L. Neil Smith

Fort Collins, Colorado

August, 2008

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Tom Paine Maru

Prologue: Asperance Down

A soft, fragrant wind heralded the coming of darkness. It brought with it the distant murmur of thunder.

“
Asperance
Re-entry Command to Lifeshell Four, come in?”

Silence.

“
Asperance
Re-entry Command to Lifeshell Five, come in?”

The radio operator’s pleas were rewarded only with an empty static crackle. Eyes streaming, he backed away from the flames as the breeze shifted suddenly in my direction. What is it they say about smoke following beauty?

Beside him, standing over the smoky fire, the Lieutenant shivered, thrust his hands in the pockets of his uniform, demanding impatiently, “Any luck at all?”

Still coughing, the operator looked up from where he squatted, trying to coax a signal from the unit in his hand while heating a can of emergency rations at the same time. The expedition’s cook—along with most of our supplies—had been aboard the missing Lifeshell Four.

“Not a whisper, sir. They might be having problems with their own communicators.”

“Both units?” The thunder was a great deal louder this time, forcing the Lieutenant to repeat himself. “Both units?”

“Then again,” the operator held up his own radio, “it might be this one. I would not have any way of knowing—sir.”

That made a certain sense. The officer squatting by the fire was a botanist. Our regular communications expert was aboard the missing Lifeshell Five, the second of two re-entry vehicles we could not reach. Things would begin to get really interesting when it came time to erect the microwave array for sending a message home. That gear was aboard one of the four ablative-surfaced globes that had managed to—no, it was not quite time, yet, to say “survive”. We did not know whether the others had indeed perished, nor were we certain that we had succeeded at surviving.

The Lieutenant shook his head, silently mouthing unprintable words.

The blurry copy-processed expedition manual had ordained a landing at dawn, allowing one full period of daylight in which to establish ourselves on alien, possibly hostile territory. The planet’s searing primary had decreed that we re-write those ineptly-collated pages. Even the few hours that we had spent in orbit, shielded behind nearly-opaqued photo-responsive plastic, had blackened the hardiest of us, covering some in weeping blisters. Thus we had chosen a landing site in the high northern latitudes, prayed, then triggered the retro-igniters.

The landing had not been quite as bad as the scientist had said it might be. I had fractured a bone in my foot in two places. Four lifeshells had grounded violently within a few klicks of one another. We had not as yet located the other pair, although there was a fresh crater nearby. Where there had once stood eighteen intrepid Starmen, select of nation-state, pride of an entire planet, there now trembled a dozen frightened, homesick souls, variously shattered, unanimously bewildered.

Again, that low mutter of thunder toward the horizon.

I checked my makeshift splint before attending to the other wounded. The aluminum pistol cleaning rods kept slipping off my instep to a position either side of the arch, where they could not prevent the flexing of my twice-broken foot. It was growing dark rapidly. Thunder boomed with increasing regularity until it threatened to become a continuous, intimidating roll. I should already have broken out the expedition’s arsenal. But so many wounded needed help—our medical officer, with his precious supplies, was lost in Lifeshell Five—that there had not been time so far to think about my regular duties.

Dazzled, shaken though we were, the surface of this planet seemed like heaven: rich with life, moist. Even here, on this twilit winter hemisphere the soil was warm, darkly aromatic. Four small moons blazed overhead, their reflected glory unbearable to look upon directly. It was a place to build a new beginning, to love a woman, to raise a family.

Not a square centimeter was uncovered by green growing things. Ordinary birds, extraordinary in their numbers, filled the trees with music. Pale, day-bleached grasses whispered with the hasty passage of tiny, furry, four-legged creatures, or sparkled with half-hidden multicolored scaly life. Insects swarmed in myriads. Even as we cursed them, we laughed with delighted astonishment while they pricked away at us.

Not a hundred meters from the landing site there was a brook with a small pond behind a barrier of mud-caked branches made by some broad-tailed swimming mammal. For a solid hour, earlier in the day, I had sat at its edge, dangling my ruined foot, more running water trickling between my bare toes than my family had used throughout my lifetime.

Now the thought gave me a feeling of guilty apprehension.

As a precaution, I crawled back into Lifeshell One, fumbling through the litter at the bottom. I began uncrating hand-weapons—eight millimeter Darrick automatic revolvers—getting them loaded, ready in their racks. Even through the thick walls I could hear the thunder now. Our telescopic survey from orbit had betrayed sparse signs of primitive settlement. On the one-problem-at-a-time principle we had chosen to land as far away from those as possible. Still ... Finding a pair of oblong, foil-wrapped packages, I stripped off the wrapping, exposing a pair of reloaders, tipped one of them into the port of a weapon, then thumbed the triangular plastic cartridges into its grip-magazine. Repeating the procedure, I then fastened two issue holsters to my equipment belt. Now, if something unexpected happened, there would be at least one pistol ready for each of the mission commanders.

Carrying another half-dozen Darricks, still in their corrosion-proof containers, I crawled out of the lifeshell toward the rack I had erected earlier beside the fire. Already the least injured men were trying, under the Lieutenant’s direction, to inflate our microwave dish, spreading the limp plastic it was made of in a circle safely distant from the sparks being whisked into the air by the twilight breeze. Like one of those sparks, our home star would drift across the sky sometime tonight. Our signals would take two years to get there from here.

No time like the present to start.

Thunder boomed!

This time it did not die. Suddenly ...
they were upon us,
half-lit figures out of a horror story, come to do their bloody business under the broad light of the moons, night-raiders riding us down from the sweat-foamed backs of tall, long-legged beasts whose disminded screams mingled with those of the helpless victims they helped to slaughter.

At the edge of the encampment, I watched as an officer was was lifted, impaled on a lance-point, tossed away like refuse, smashed against the hard ground. The frail plastic of the microwave dish, our only link with home, was shredded beneath the monsters’ hooves. Beside the fire, the botanist/radioman went down before a single, crushing sword-slash.

The sun had not been down an hour.

The Lieutenant ran at me, his mouth agape with terror. I struggled with a holster-flap, freed the gun, stretched it toward him. He never touched it. A rider, firelight reflecting blood-red off half-tarnished armor, overrode him, cutting him down with a vicious swipe of his sword.

The Lieutenant stumbled, grunting with surprise as much as pain, then collapsed. The rider swept past him, aiming his broadsword at me. Before I realized what was happening, the Darrick’s sights were on the grill-slotted front of his helmet. I pulled the trigger. Bloody flesh exploded through the helmet’s seams. The beast went on without its rider.

In a stride, unconscious of my wounded foot, I was standing over the Lieutenant. Above the bellowing clamor of armor, hooves, men possessed by the exultation of killing or the terror of dying, the Darrick’s blast had seized the attention of our attackers. Someone galloped toward me, a huge plume bobbing atop his helmet. He stopped his mount half a dozen meters from me, dipped his lance, kicked the animal’s sides.

Aiming for a helmet again, I fired, then cocked the Darrick. The empty triangular plastic casing fell at my feet to join the first one I’d fired.

A second nearly-headless rider toppled, spilling his life over his animal’s neck. I heard a war-cry close beside me. For the first time I was aware that I had the other pistol out of its holster. My front sight found its own way to the mark. Another skull exploded within its steel jacket.

My right-hand Darrick spoke again. Another alien fell, dashing his bullet-churned insides on the ground. A red haze formed before my eyes as the universe became the sound of my guns, the shadow of both front sights against firelit body-steel, the clash of bloody-edged metal, the flashes of my pistol muzzles in the dark. Men fell, shouting with surprised anger, screaming with agony, gibbering with fear.