Hope Renewed Read online

  Table of Contents

  West Residence Map

  CHAPTER ONE

  CHAPTER TWO

  CHAPTER THREE

  CHAPTER FOUR

  CHAPTER FIVE

  CHAPTER SIX

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  CHAPTER NINE

  CHAPTER TEN

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  Drangos Map

  Forge Map 1

  CHAPTER ONE

  CHAPTER TWO

  CHAPTER THREE

  CHAPTER FOUR

  CHAPTER FIVE

  CHAPTER SIX

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  CHAPTER NINE

  CHAPTER TEN

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

  CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

  CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

  CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

  CHAPTER THIRTY

  EPILOGUE

  Visager Map

  Santander City Map

  Corona Map

  Oathtakeing Map

  Hope Renewed

  S.M. Stirling

  David Drake

  Contains Books #5 and #6 The Sword and The Chosen, in the best selling General series.

  The Empire of Man has fallen and a new Dark Age is upon the stars. With planets cut off and reduced to subsistence and ignorance, humanity has nearly forgotten its past greatness. But one battle computer has survived the Collapse. He is Center. And Center is determined to find and aid leaders who can return a star-faring republic to the galaxy. The first of these leaders is Raj Whitehall, a man born to be a general, and molded to retake civilization itself from the jaws of barbarism.

  The Sword

  For five years Raj Whitehall has led his men across the face of the planet Bellevue. With saber and bayonet he has conquered one barbarian nation after another. Now his greatest enemy is his own overlord, Barholm Clerett, who's so paranoid of Raj's victories that he is reduced to only one thought: Raj Whitehall must die.

  The Chosen

  Planted by interstellar probes on hundreds of human-occupied worlds, the downloaded personalities of Raj Whitehall and the ancient battle computer known as Center work together for planetary unity. On Visager, a nation-state of vicious militarists is about to start the final war that will bring their fatal racist infection to the stars. Now two young men once at odds in war must unite and, with the aid of the disembodied voices of their mentors from the stars, stand against exporting eternal tyranny to the galaxy itself.

  BAEN BOOKS

  by DAVID DRAKE

  THE GENERAL SERIES

  Hope Reborn with S.M. Stirling (omnibus)

  Hope Rearmed with S.M. Stirling (omnibus)

  Hope Renewed with S.M. Stirling (omnibus)

  The Tyrant with Eric Flint

  The Heretic with Tony Daniel

  The Savior with Tony Daniel

  THE RCN SERIES

  With the Lightnings

  Lt. Leary, Commanding

  The Far Side of the Stars

  The Way to Glory

  Some Golden Harbor

  When the Tide Rises

  In the Stormy Red Sky

  What Distant Deeps

  The Road of Danger

  The Sea Without a Shore (forthcoming)

  HAMMER’S SLAMMERS

  The Tank Lords

  Caught in the Crossfire

  The Sharp End

  The Complete Hammer’s Slammers, Vols 1–3

  INDEPENDENT NOVELS AND COLLECTIONS

  All the Way to the Gallows

  Cross the Stars

  Foreign Legions, edited by David Drake

  Grimmer Than Hell

  Loose Cannon

  Night & Demons

  Northworld Trilogy

  Patriots

  The Reaches Trilogy

  Redliners

  Seas of Venus

  Starliner

  Into the Hinterlands with John Lambshead

  THE BELISARIUS SERIES with Eric Flint

  An Oblique Approach

  In the Heart of Darkness

  Belisarius I: Thunder Before Dawn (omnibus)

  Destiny’s Shield

  Fortune’s Stroke

  Belisarius II: Storm at Noontide (omnibus)

  The Tide of Victory

  The Dance of Time

  Belisarius III: The Flames of Sunset (omnibus)

  EDITED BY DAVID DRAKE

  The World Turned Upside Down with Jim Baen & Eric Flint

  HOPE RENEWED

  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.

  The Sword copyright © 1995 by S.M. Stirling and David Drake.

  The Chosen copyright © 1996 by S.M. Stirling and David Drake.

  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: 978-1-4767-3658-7

  Cover art by Kurt Miller

  First Baen paperback printing, July 2014

  Distributed by Simon & Schuster

  1230 Avenue of the Americas

  New York, NY 10020

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Drake, David, 1945-

  [Novels. Selections]

  Hope renewed / David Drake and S.M. Stirling.

  pages cm

  Includes bibliographical references and index.

  ISBN 978-1-4767-3658-7 (paperback)

  1. Whitehall, Raj (Fictitious character)--Fiction. 2. Imaginary wars and battles--Fiction. 3. Space warfare--Fiction. 4. Science fiction, American. I. Stirling, S. M. II. Stirling, S. M. Sword. III. Stirling, S. M. Chosen. IV. Title.

  PS3569.T543H68 2014

  813'.54--dc23

  2014014391

  Printed in the United States of America

  10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  eISBN: 978-1-62579-297-6

  Electronic Version by Baen Books

  www.baen.com

  To Jan

  West Residence Map

  CHAPTER ONE

  “Raj?” Thom Poplanich muttered.

  Then, slowly: “Raj, how old are you?”

  Raj Whitehall managed a smile. “Thirty,” he said.

  The perfect mirrored sphere of Sector Command and Control Unit AZ12-b14-c000 Mk. XIV’s central . . . being . . . showed an image which seemed to give the lie to that. It wasn’t the gray hairs or the scars on the backs of his hands that made him seem at least forty, or ageless.

  It was the eyes.

  Thom looked at his own image. Nothing at all had changed since that moment when he’d frozen into immobility, five years ago. Not the unhealed shaving nick on his thin olive cheek, or the tear in his floppy tweed trousers from a revolver bullet.

  life is change, Center said. The voice of the ancient computer was like their own thoughts, but with a vibrato overton
e that somehow carried a sense of immense weight like a pressure against the film of consciousness. even i change.

  Raj and Thom looked up, startled. “Center? You’re alive?” Thom asked.

  No words whispered in their skull. Thom looked at his friend. Raj looks like an old man.

  I haven’t changed a hair, outwardly . . . but that’s the least of it. Five years of mental communion with the machine that held all Mankind’s accumulated knowledge. Five years, or eternity. He thought of his life before that day, and it was . . . unimaginable. Less real than the scenarios Center could spin from webs of data and stochastic analysis.

  The two men gripped forearms, then exchanged the embrahzo of close friends. Thom could smell coal-smoke and gun-oil on the wool of his friend’s uniform jacket, that and riding dogs and Suzette Whitehall’s sambuca jasmine perfume.

  The scents cut through the icy certainties Center’s teaching had implanted in his mind. Unshed tears prickled at his eyes as he held the bigger man at arm’s length.

  “It’s good to see you again, my friend,” he said quietly.

  “Yes, that’s . . . well, I came to say goodbye.”

  “Goodbye?” Thom asked sharply.

  “That’s right,” Raj said, turning slightly away. His eyes moved across the perfect mirrored surface of the sphere, that impossibly reflected without distorting. “Things . . . well, Cabot Clerett, the Governor’s nephew” —and heir, they both knew— “was along on the campaign. There were a number of difficulties, and he, ah, was killed.”

  “Spirit of Man of the Stars,” Thom blurted. “You came back to East Residence after that? Barholm was suspicious of you anyway.”

  Raj gave a small crooked smile and shrugged. “I didn’t reconquer the Southern and Western Territories for the Civil Government just to set myself up as a warlord,” he said. “Center said that would be worse for civilization than if I’d never lived at all.”

  an oversimplification but accurate to within 93%, ±2, Center added remorselessly. Over the years their minds had learned subtlety in interpreting that voice; there was a tinge of . . . not pity, but perhaps compassion to it now. the long-term prospects for restoration of the federation, here on bellevue and eventually elsewhere in the human-settled galaxy, required raj whitehall’s submission to the civil authorities. too many generals have seized the chair by force.

  Thom nodded. The process had started long before Bellevue was isolated by the destruction of its Tanaki Spatial Displacement net. The Federation had been slagging down in civil wars for a generation before that, biting out its own guts like a brain-shot sauroid. The process had continued here in the thousand-odd years since, and according to Center everywhere else in the human-settled galaxy as well.

  “Couldn’t Lady Anne do something?” he asked. Barholm’s consort was a close friend of Raj’s wife Suzette, had been since Anne was merely the . . . entertainer was the polite phrase . . . that young Barholm had unaccountably married despite being the Governor’s nephew. The other court ladies had turned a cold shoulder back before Barholm assumed the Chair; Suzette hadn’t.

  “She died four months ago,” Raj said. “Cancer.”

  A brief flash of vision: a canopied bed, with the incense of the Star priests around it and the drone of their prayers. A woman lying motionless, flesh fallen in on the strong handsome bones of her face, hair a white cloud on the pillow with only a few streaks of its mahogany red left. Suzette Whitehall sat at the bedside, one hand gripping the ivory colored claw-hand of her dying friend. Her face was an expressionless mask, but slow tears ran from the slanted green eyes and dripped down on the priceless snowy torofib of the sheets.

  “Damn,” Thom said. “I know she wanted every Poplanich dead, but . . . well, Anne had twice Barholm’s guts, and she was loyal to her friends, at least.”

  Raj nodded. “It was right after that that I was suspended from my last posting—Inspector-General—and my properties confiscated. Chancellor Tzetzas handled it personally.”

  “That . . . that . . . he gives graft a bad name,” Thom spat.

  Raj smiled wanly. “Yes, if the Chancellor didn’t hate me, I’d wonder what I was doing wrong.”

  A flash from Center; a tall thin man in a bureaucrat’s court robe sitting at a desk. The room was quietly elegant, dark, silent; a cigarette in a holder of carved sauroid ivory rested in one slim-fingered hand. He signed a heavy parchment, dusted the ink with fine sand, and smiled. A secretary sprang forward to melt wax for the seal . . .

  Raj nodded. “I expect to be arrested at the levee this afternoon. Barholm’s worried—”

  Thom laid a hand on Raj’s shoulder. The muscle under the wool jacket was like india rubber. It quivered with tension.

  “You should make yourself Governor, Raj,” he said quietly. “Spirit knows, you couldn’t be worse than Barholm and his cronies.”

  Raj smiled, but he shook his head. “Thanks, Thom—but if I have a gift for command, it’s only for soldiers. Civilians . . . I couldn’t get three of them to follow me into a whorehouse with an offer of free drinks and pussy. Not unless I had a squad behind them with bayonets; and you can’t govern that way, not for long. I’d smash the machinery trying to make it work. Barholm is a son-of-a-bitch, but he’s a smart one. He knows how to stroke the bureaucracy and keep the nobility satisfied, and he really is binding the Civil Government together with his railroads and law reforms . . . granted a lot of his hangers-on are getting rich in the process, but it’s working. I couldn’t do it. Not so’s it’d last past my lifetime.”

  observe:

  —and they saw Raj Whitehall on a throne of gold and diamond, and men of races they’d never heard of knelt before him with tribute and gifts . . .

  . . . and he lay ancient and white-haired in a vast silken bed. Muffled chanting came from outside the window, and a priest prayed quietly. A few elderly officers wept, but the younger ones eyed each other with undisguised hunger, waiting for the old king to die.

  One bent and spoke in his ear. “Who?” he said. “Who do you leave the keyboard and the power to?”

  The ancient Raj’s lips moved. The officer turned and spoke loudly, drowning out the whisper: “He says, to the strongest.”

  Armies clashed, in identical green uniforms and carrying Raj Whitehall’s banner. Cities burned. At last there was a peaceful green mound that only the outline of the land showed had once been the Gubernatorial Palace in East Residence. Two men worked in companionable silence by a campfire, clad only in loincloths of tanned hide. One was chipping a spearpoint from a piece of an ancient window, the shaft and binding thongs ready to hand. His fingers moved with sure skill, using a bone anvil and striker to spall long flakes from the green glass. His comrade worked with equal artistry, butchering a carcass with a heavy hammerstone and slivers of flint. It took a moment to realize that the body had once been human.

  Raj shivered. That was the logical endpoint of the cycle of collapse here on Bellevue, and throughout what had once been the Federation; if it wasn’t prevented, there would be savagery for fifteen thousand years before a new civilization arose. The image had haunted him since Center first showed it. It felt true.

  “Spirit knows, I don’t want Barholm’s job,” he went on. “I like to do what I do well, and that isn’t my area of expertise. The problem is getting Barholm to understand that.”

  barholm’s data gives him substantial reason for apprehension, Center pointed out. not only does raj whitehall have the prestige of constant victory, but more than sixteen battalions of the civil government’s cavalry are now comprised of ex-prisoners from the former military governments.

  Squadrones and Brigaderos; Namerique-speaking barbarians, descendants of Federation troops gone savage up in the desolate Base Area of the far northwest. They’d swept down and taken over huge chunks of the Civil Government, imposing their rule and their heretical Spirit of Man of This Earth cult on the population. Nobody had been able to do anything about it . . . until Barholm sent Raj
Whitehall to reconquer the barbarian realms of the Military Governments.

  Governor Barholm had officially proclaimed Raj the Sword of the Spirit of Man. The prisoners who’d volunteered to serve the Civil Government had seen him in operation from both sides. They believed that title.

  “Then stay here!” Thom said. “Center can hold you in stasis, like me—hold you until Barholm’s dust and bones. You’ve done all you can, you’ve done your duty, now you deserve something for yourself. It won’t further the reunification of Bellevue for you to commit suicide!”

  probability of furthering the restoration of the federation is slightly increased if raj whitehall attends the levee, Center said.

  “I must go. I must. I—”

  Raj turned back, and Thom recoiled a half step. The other man’s teeth were showing, and a muscle twitched on one cheek. “I . . . there’s been so much dying . . . I can’t . . . so many dead, so many, how can I save myself?”

  “They were enemies,” Thom said softly.

  “No! Not them. My own men! I used men like bullets! There aren’t one in three of the 5th Descott Guards remaining, of the ones who rode out with me against the Colony five years ago. Poplanich’s Own—raised from your family estates, Thom—had a hundred and fifty casualties in one battle, and I was leading them.”

  Thom opened his mouth, then closed it again. Center cut in on them, an iron impatience in its non-voice:

  leading is the operative word, raj whitehall. you were leading them. observe: