Shadows of Annihilation Read online

  PRAISE FOR THEATER OF SPIES

  “Stirling’s sequel to Black Chamber showcases a sexy and intelligent female spy couple who garner comparisons with James Bond and Jack Ryan. A masterly mashup of historical context and sf plausibility.”

  —Library Journal

  “Stirling knows how to write thrillers, and Luz is a fascinating and compelling viewpoint character.”

  —Locus

  “Mr. Stirling injects existential peril immediately. . . . There is constant awareness of sexuality, fine weaponry exposure, and a superb climax. This is well worth your time.”

  —Manhattan Book Review

  “Readers will have fun seeing the game of espionage played on a very dangerous court.”

  —Crimespree Magazine

  PRAISE FOR BLACK CHAMBER

  “As always, [Stirling] comes up with inventive twists that keep your mind racing and the pages turning. Bravo!”

  —Robert J. Sawyer, Hugo Award–winning author of Quantum Night

  “The nice thing about getting a Steve Stirling book in the mail is that you know for a few hours you can fly on dreams of wonder, travelling to a world so much more than this angry reality.”

  —John Ringo, author of Under a Graveyard Sky

  “It’s a great feeling being in the hands of an alternate history master, who knows his material and crafts an utterly plausible world. Stirling gives us Teddy Roosevelt’s USA and a Cuban-Irish-American secret agent who’s more than a match for an airship full of James Bonds.”

  —Django Wexler, author of The Infernal Battalion

  “Imagine that World War One began in Europe with the activist Teddy Roosevelt in the White House instead of the academic Woodrow Wilson. You’ve got a dandy steampunk setting for a slam-bang spy thriller with an engaging female protagonist.”

  —David Drake, author of Death’s Bright Day

  “One of the most intriguing and entertaining adventures to come along in years.”

  —Diana L. Paxson, author of Sword of Avalon

  “Serves us a World War One America under a Theodore Roosevelt presidency, spiced with all the possibilities, good and bad, that Stirling’s ever-ambitious imagination and meticulous approach to historical can cook up.”

  —A. M. Dellamonica, author of The Nature of a Pirate

  “This is a sheer joy of an alternative history. . . . If you can put this book down once you’ve picked it up, I’ll eat my bowler hat.”

  —Patricia Finney, author of Gloriana’s Torch

  “One mighty fine read—sexy, action-filled adventure in a thoughtful alternate history.”

  —Lawrence Watt-Evans, author of the Obsidian Chronicles

  “This novel provides a desperately needed infusion of courage and originality. How appropriate that Penguin, publisher of the James Bond novels, launches a hard-edged new spy series with Stirling. How appropriate that Ace, famous for classic science fiction, is on board for the adventure.”

  —Brad Linaweaver, Prometheus Award–winning author of Moon of Ice

  ALSO BY S. M. STIRLING

  Novels of an Alternate World War I

  Black Chamber

  Theater of Spies

  Shadows of Annihilation

  Novels of the Change

  Island in the Sea of Time

  Against the Tide of Years

  On the Oceans of Eternity

  Dies the Fire

  The Protector’s War

  A Meeting at Corvallis

  The Sunrise Lands

  The Scourge of God

  The Sword of the Lady

  The High King of Montival

  The Tears of the Sun

  Lord of Mountains

  The Given Sacrifice

  The Golden Princess

  The Desert and the Blade

  Prince of Outcasts

  The Sea Peoples

  The Sky-Blue Wolves

  Novels of the Shadowspawn

  A Taint in the Blood

  The Council of Shadows

  Shadows of Falling Night

  Other Novels by S. M. Stirling

  The Peshawar Lancers

  Conquistador

  ACE

  Published by Berkley

  An imprint of Penguin Random House LLC

  penguinrandomhouse.com

  Copyright © 2020 by S. M. Stirling

  Penguin Random House supports copyright. Copyright fuels creativity, encourages diverse voices, promotes free speech, and creates a vibrant culture. Thank you for buying an authorized edition of this book and for complying with copyright laws by not reproducing, scanning, or distributing any part of it in any form without permission. You are supporting writers and allowing Penguin Random House to continue to publish books for every reader.

  ACE is a registered trademark and the A colophon is a trademark of Penguin Random House LLC.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Names: Stirling, S. M., author.

  Title: Shadows of annihilation / S.M. Stirling.

  Description: First edition. | New York: Ace, 2020. | Series: A novel of an alternate World War I

  Identifiers: LCCN 2019039123 (print) | LCCN 2019039124 (ebook) | ISBN 9780399586279 (paperback) | ISBN 9780399586286 (ebook)

  Subjects: LCSH: World War, 1914–1918—Fiction. | GSAFD: Alternative histories (Fiction) | Spy stories.

  Classification: LCC PS3569.T543 S53 2020 (print) | LCC PS3569.T543 (ebook) | DDC 813/.54—dc23

  LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019039123

  LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019039124

  First Edition: March 2020

  Cover art and design by Adam Auerbach

  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.

  pid_prh_5.5.0_c0_r0

  Contents

  Praise for Theater of Spies

  Also by S. M. Stirling

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Acknowledgments

  Epigraph

  Prologue

  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

  Epilogue

  About the Author

  To Jan, for thirty years of love, happiness, and comradeship

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  To Kier Salmon, longtime close friend and valued advisor, whose help with things in Spanish and about Mexico, where most of this book is set—she lived there into adulthood—has been very, very helpful with this series, as well as her general advice to which I have always listened carefully. My mother grew up speaking Spanish too (in Lima, Peru), but, alas, she and my aunt used it as a secret code the chil
dren couldn’t understand, and Kier has been invaluable filling in those lacunae, as well as being a fine editor (and promising writer) in her own right.

  To Markus Baur, for help with the German language and as a first reader.

  To Dave Drake, for help with the Latin bits and a deep knowledge of firearms acquired in several different ways. Also, collaborating with him taught me how to outline.

  To Alyx Dellamonica, for advice, native-guide work, and just generally being cool. Her wife, Kelly Robson, is cool too and an extremely talented writer now winning implausible numbers of awards. An asteroid would have to strike Toronto to seriously dent the awesomeness of this pair. Soon Alyx will have another book out and it is great; I say this with smug certainty, since I got to read it in manuscript. Fortunately, writing is one of those fields where you have colleagues, not competitors.

  To my first readers: Steve Brady, Pete Sartucci, Ara Ogle, Markus Baur, and Scott Palter.

  To Patricia Finney (aka P. F. Chisholm), for friendship and her own wonderful books, starting with A Shadow of Gulls (which she wrote when she was in her teens, at which point I was still doing Edgar Rice Burroughs pastiche fanfic) and going on from there. One of the best historical novelists of our generation!

  And to Walter Jon Williams, Emily Mah, John Miller, Vic Milán (still present in spirit), Jan Stirling, Matt Reiten, Lauren Teffeau, S. E. Burr, Sarena Ulibarri, and Rebecca Roanhorse of Critical Mass, our writers’ group, for constant help and advice.

  And to Joe’s Dining (http://joesdining.com/) and Ecco Espresso and Gelato (http://www.eccogelato.com/) here in Santa Fe, for putting up with my interminable presence and my habit of making faces and muttering dialogue as I write.

  Love of peace is common among weak, short-sighted, timid, and lazy persons; and on the other hand courage is found among many men of evil temper and bad character. Neither quality shall by itself avail.

  —Theodore Roosevelt

  PROLOGUE

  Washington, D.C.

  Oval Office

  White House

  JUNE 10TH, AD 1917, 1917(B)

  Point of Departure plus 5 Years

  No, Mr. President, the decision to withdraw from France was sound.”

  General Wood’s voice with its soft Massachusetts accent was steady.

  “It’s a defeat, and nothing but,” Theodore Roosevelt growled over his shoulder, the words like acid in his mouth and his hands bunched into fists in his jacket pockets.

  This was the day the last of the American Expeditionary Force had withdrawn from Europe, leaving only the sacrificial French rearguards holding a shrinking semicircle around Marseilles and Toulon. He stared out the Oval Office windows at tree-lined Pennsylvania Avenue and the White House gardens, but his mind’s eye was seeing grim, grimy men filing aboard rusty transports under an acrid smoke-pall of burning buildings and supply dumps, as artillery muttered and flickered to the north, like a distant thunderstorm that never ended, and the thunder-reply as battleships and cruisers in the harbors pounded out broadsides in reply toward the horizon.

  The green and flowery smell of early summer on the Potomac floated through the windows. Its warmth and sweetness felt incongruous in a world gripped in an iron winter of the spirit, as the Great War spread its infinite malice around the globe and whole nations were burned and beaten into dust. His trained naturalist’s ear and mind automatically cataloged the birdsong he heard—he could identify more than fifty species by their calls alone—but for once there was no joy in it.

  The president turned away and sat once more behind the desk that had been made from the timbers of a Royal Navy ship long ago. The chair creaked under his solid weight, even now mostly muscle, and he forced himself not to snarl as he confronted his two closest advisors. General Leonard Wood was Chief of the Supreme General Staff, winner of the Medal of Honor in the Apache Wars, a very old friend from the Rough Riders and before, and co-creator of the modern American military. John Elbert Wilkie was Director of the Secret Service and, far more importantly, its child the Black Chamber, the shadowy network of spies and operatives and analysts that was sometimes as important as the Army.

  Both were of his generation, born like him within two years of Lincoln’s election, finally taking over from the Civil War veterans in the new century and showing they too could reach for greatness.

  “Yes, it is a defeat, Mr. President. With several real buts, but still a defeat,” General Wood said calmly. “It’s still the sensible thing to do. We can . . . we must . . . ask men to die for their country, but trying to hold on longer would have been throwing lives away for our vanity’s sake. This isn’t a war that will be settled by a single battle, or a single campaign either. Any more than the British wars against France under the Revolution and then Napoleon were—that took twenty-five years, and it was a whale fighting an elephant that time too.”

  “L’état, ce n’est pas moi,” Roosevelt said ruefully, flipping Louis XIV’s famous bit of . . .

  Vanity, he thought.

  . . . on its head. “I myself am not the nation. The Republic can survive this, even if it’s ashes in my mouth.”

  “No man has done the Republic greater service, Mr. President,” Director Wilkie said. “My God, can you imagine what we’d be facing if Woodrow Wilson was president and trying to deal with this?”

  They all grimaced slightly at the thought. Roosevelt had made the decision to withdraw, on the advice of these two and against the prompting of his own deepest instincts, what he felt in his heart and belly . . .

  Yet my brain agrees with my advisors, alas, and I’m going to listen to reason—it goes with sitting in this chair. But does anyone ever enjoy hearing someone else tell him to “be realistic” and “take a steady strain”?

  Roosevelt’s eyes flicked to the portrait of Lincoln on the wall, and the bust in its niche; he always kept one of each in a place he worked for any length of time.

  The president’s anger wasn’t really directed at the general or the spymaster, but it said something about them that neither quailed in the slightest. Even amid his frustration and rage he felt a flash of satisfaction at that; he’d never hidden the fact that he liked power and relished command, the ability to make things happen, but he despised the useless flabbiness of yes-men and refused to tolerate them in his inner circle.

  Power is a fine thing because it lets you do, do work worth doing. And you can’t do it alone, not the big jobs. A truly powerful man needs powerful support—which means strong subordinates with strong minds of their own.

  “Wise men don’t try to argue with arithmetic,” Wood went on. “We hit the Germans a few good licks, and kept them from the Mediterranean for longer than I expected. Our tanks . . .”

  He used the name that had started as a code meant to conceal a little self-consciously, however widely and quickly it had spread. The official War Department designation was Armored Fighting Vehicle, Turreted, Tracked, Mk. I, and absolutely nobody used it, except in official documents.

  “. . . were a very nasty surprise for them, and not the only one we handed out. But we just couldn’t supply a large enough force when they were only a day or two from their bases by rail and we were operating across an ocean. Not enough ships, not if we were to keep Britain going at the same time through the U-boat packs and get at least some food and supplies to the French. And not enough harbor capacity with Toulon and Marseilles our only real ports of entry, even if we did have the ships.”

  “A few good licks boils no potatoes,” the president growled. “Bobby Lee hit the Army of the Potomac a few good licks too in our fathers’ time, and where did it get him and the Confederate States? Appomattox Court House, that’s where, thank God. When I hit a man, I want him to fall down, not just wince and stagger a bit. Fall down and stay down.”

  He meant that too, and he knew the truth of it in his knuckles and his bone and gut.

 
A flash of memory, and he was face-to-face again with that drunken killer in Nolan’s Saloon, one of the things that had defined him to himself, within the privacy of his own soul.

  The mean brown-stained grin and stinking breath and bloodshot eyes . . . and the trip-hammer feeling of power as he’d replied to the threat of the six-shooters with a left-right-left to the jaw. The crack-crack and twin jets of smoke from the .45s amid a smell of rotten egg and cheap whiskey and chewing tobacco spat into the sawdust on the floor, as the gunman crumpled and thumped his head against the rail. A fraction slower and he might have bled to death on that floor himself, one more set of young bones in the lawless Badlands frontier of the 1880s.

  He’d been too late for the Indians—just—but the white frontiersmen had been every bit as wild, more numerous, and much better armed.

  “They’re still letting masses of civilians through their lines outside the ports,” Wood observed; he knew what Roosevelt had just said was a statement of opinion, or possibly principle, not an argument. “They could take Toulon and Marseilles now if they were willing to pay a hefty butcher’s bill for pushing their heavy artillery within range of the docks, even with the naval gunfire support we’re giving the French, but instead they’re inching in very slowly and cautiously.”

  “Because while it may not have been what they had in mind last October 6th, now they’ve decided they want France as an empty wasteland they can settle with their own people, General,” Wilkie said. “Marseilles and Toulon are the spout of the funnel and they’re letting us hold it open while they squeeze at the top. They’ll take the ports when the bag’s empty as it’s going to get, later this year.”

  Somewhere Ludendorff was laughing the particular, nasty laugh of a man who’d given his enemy a set of choices that started with very bad and ran on through various degrees of even worse than that.

  “It’s the dilemma from hell,” the president said ruefully. “Damned if you do and if you don’t. There must be more Frenchmen . . . and French women and children . . . in North Africa now than there are left alive in France itself, what with the horror-gas and battlefield losses and now mass famine and epidemics in the occupied zone. That’s worse than Ireland in ’48.”