The Battle of Sauron Read online

  The Battle of Sauron

  A Pequod Press War World Novel

  Printing History

  A portion of this novel first appeared in WAR WORLD Vol. I: The Burning Eye edited by Jerry E. Pournelle and John F. Carr, published by Baen Books in 1988. This Second Edition has been significantly revised.

  All Rights Reserved

  Copyright © 2007 by John F. Carr and Donald Hawthorne

  Copyright © 2013 by John F. Carr and Donald Hawthorne

  Original Cover Art—Copyright © 2007 and 2013 by Alan Gutierrez

  Map by Alan Gutierrez

  This book may not be reproduced or transmitted in whole or in part, in any form or by any means electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, scanning, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the authors.

  Printed in the United States of America

  Second Edition 2013

  V 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2

  ISBN: 978-0-937912-25-6

  WAR WORLD VOLUMES

  EDITED BY JOHN F. CARR AND J.E. POURNELLE

  War World I: The Burning Eye

  War World II: Death’s Head Rebellion

  War World III: Sauron Dominion

  War World IV: Invasion!

  CoDominium I: Revolt on War World

  WAR WORLD VOLUMES

  EDITED BY JOHN F. CARR

  WAR WORLD: Discovery!

  WAR WORLD: Takeover

  WAR WORLD: Jihad! (forthcoming)

  WAR WORLD NOVELS

  Blood Feuds

  Blood Vengeance

  The Battle for Sauron

  The Lidless Eye (forthcoming)

  Cyborg Revolt (forthcoming)

  DEDICATION

  To our lovely wives, Victoria and Maria.

  Chronology

  1969

  Neil Armstrong sets foot on Earth’s moon.

  1990-2000

  Series of treaties between the United States and the Soviet Union creates the CoDominium. Military research and development outlawed.

  1995

  Nationalist movements intensify.

  1996

  French Foreign Legion forms the basic element of the CoDominium Armed Services.

  2004

  Alderson Drive perfected at Cal Tech.

  2010-2100

  CoDominium Intelligence Services engage in serious effort to suppress all research into technologies with military applications. They are aided by zero-growth organizations.

  2010

  Habitable planets discovered in other star systems. Commercial exploitation of new worlds begins.

  2020

  First interstellar colonies are founded. The CoDominium Space Navy and Marines are created, absorbing the original CoDominium Armed Services.

  2020

  Great Exodus period of colonization begins. First colonists are dissidents, malcontents and voluntary adventurers.

  2028

  Creation of the Humanity League. Sponsored by the A.C.L.U., Sierra Club and Zero Population groups.

  2030

  Sergei Lermontov born in Moscow.

  2038

  Sauron is discovered by Avery Landyn, a survey pilot for 3M; world is rich in radioactive and heavy metals.

  2040

  CoDominium Population Control under the aegis of the Bureau of Relocation and Bureau of Corrections begin mass shipments of minorities and involuntary colonists.

  2040

  Colonization of Sparta and Saint Ekaterina.

  2042

  Initial attempts by 3M at colonizing Sauron fail due to deadly native fauna and the difficulty of establishing viable agriculture. 3M sells Sauron to wealthy English Separatists from Quebec and former South African expatriates living in Canada and Australia.

  2043

  John Christian Falkenberg III is born in Rome.

  2060

  Nationalistic revival movements continue.

  2098

  Saurons evict the CoDominium Viceroy and declare their independence. They begin to build their own space navy.

  2103

  Great Patriotic Wars. End of the CoDominium. Exodus of the Fleet.

  2110

  Coronation of Lysander I of Sparta. Fleet swears loyalty to the Spartan Throne. Marriage of dynasties produces union between Sparta and St. Ekaterina.

  2111

  Formation Wars begin.

  2250

  Leonidas I proclaims the Empire of Man.

  2250 – 2600

  Empire of Man enforces interstellar peace.

  2432

  First Cyborg is created on Sauron.

  2603

  Secession Wars begin. Growth of Sauron supermen. St. Ekaterina nearly destroyed.

  2618

  The Third Imperial Fleet is destroyed off Tabletop

  2623

  Seventy-seventh Imperial Marine Division (“Land Gators”) is withdrawn from Haven along with all Imperial officials. Colonel Gary Cummings retires from the Imperial Marines and is appointed Brigadier-General of the Haven Volunteers.

  2637

  Sauron-supported Secessionist armada and Claimant fleets fight Imperials to a draw at the Battle of Makassar.

  Contents

  Dedication

  Chronology

  Prologue

  Part One: The Face of the Enemy

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Part Two: The Eye Closes

  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

  Chapter Thirty-One

  Chapter Thirty-Two

  Chapter Thirty-Three

  Chapter Thirty-Four

  About the Author

  PROLOGUE

  Wayforth Station, 2626 A.D.

  Station Chief Emil Basov looked out the Wayforth Station viewport at the stars glittering like diamonds on a black velvet backdrop. His heart soared at the glorious sight; one no mere jeweler could ever hope to imitate. While he saw the same starscape every day, it still touched him just the same. It’s unfortunate that most administrators have an undeserved reputation as soulless bureaucrats, he decided. I see beauty everywhere—even here in the depths of space on this god-forsaken station—just like everyone else.

  Maybe more so, since he was a native of Tanith, one of the harshest worlds in the Empire of Man. On Tanith, since his parents had been lucky enough to work for the government, they had lived in a tower-hub in Tran, the planet’s largest city.

  Basov knew most people would resent being stranded on this sorry excuse for a space station at the butt-end of nowhere. He didn’t mind it; his family’s quarters in the tower-hub had been almost as self-contained, with their own environmental controls and isolation from the surrounding habitat. In truth, he’d always felt sorry for those condemned to live outside the domed cities in the miserable insufferable heat and humidity, amid the tr
eacherous fauna and flora of Tanith herself.

  Habitable worlds were scarce, but stars were as common as dust so it was no surprise that some of them harbored life in its myriad of forms. However, to be useful, systems had to have at least one Alderson Point; otherwise, they were isolated by time and distance. Real time space travel was not possible with current hydrogen-drive spaceships. The distance between habitable planets was measured in parsecs and would take generations to travel by reaction drive times.

  It was hyperspace travel that made humanity’s dissemination through the galaxy possible. Hyperspace travel between stars, through an Alderson Point or along a tramline, took not an instant of measureable time, but what physicists called transfinite time. While the travel time involved in hyperspace travel is immeasurable, its effect on human passengers was profound. The Alderson Jump created confusion and disorientation—in a few cases madness—among a ship’s human passengers and its computer equipment. Some believed that the moment of Jump produced a distortion of space, resulting in confusion to both neural and computational pathways. As a result of Jump Lag, all computational equipment was turned off during the Jump and only mechanical switches were left on.

  Wayforth Station was one of the first Alderson Point Stations built during the CoDominium Era. Rheingold’s Star was named after Willy Rheingold, the CDS survey captain who had discovered it in 2035, and was what spacers called a deadhead system. The system contained six lifeless planets of various sizes, including one gas giant, Hasta, twice the size of Jupiter back on Earth, but no planet in the habitable zone. This wasn’t uncommon; only a minority of star systems contained even minimally habitable planets, and some of those were too big, too dense or too small for earth-based life. Or had a methane, or some other poisonous, atmosphere.

  In the normal course of events, Captain Rhinegold would have noted the system for the astrocartographers, moved on, and it would have been quickly forgotten but for one anomaly: The Wayforth System was an Alderson Tramline nexus. The system contained six Alderson Points, all of them but one leading to star systems with habitable worlds. One of those worlds was Sauron, which explained why the Imperial High Command considered Wayforth a strategic asset in the war against the Coalition of Secession.

  Early in the war, the Saurons invaded the Rhinegold System and wrested it from Imperial control. It had been poorly defended. At that early date, the Empire hadn’t fully considered its strategic position and value to the war effort. To the Sauron High Command it had been a primary target, since it had a tramline leading both to Sauron and St. Ekaterina, which was only three Jumps away from Sparta, the Imperial capital. The Sauron invasion of St. Ekaterina in 2603 had been the first major Sauron action in the Secession War; there the Saurons had defeated an Imperial fleet, but in the process had wrecked most of St. Ekaterina, completely destroying its industrial plant. The Saurons were eventually beaten back, but the invasion had cost the Empire its most trusted ally, an industrial powerhouse and a source of reliable troops.

  Unfortunately, the Imperial Station—a grand global structure larger than most asteroids and one of the Imperial Wonders of the Galaxy—had been destroyed in the battles that followed. When Wayforth had been retaken by the Imperial Navy, a hastily built replacement station had been put together from parts of the former station’s damaged exterior, salvaged ship hulls from the Battle of St. Ekaterina and a number of old hulls from decommissioned warships that had outlived their usefulness. In other words, a complete hodgepodge which actually worked better than it looked from the outside.

  That was why the Station had an actual window looking into space instead of a three-dimensional tactical display common to ships built after the war began. The chamber Station Chief Basov was using as his administrative office was the former bridge of the INS Midway, one of the first casualties of the War. Currently, there was only sixteen ships in-system: a New Scotland freighter being refueled at Hasta, the system’s gas giant hydrogen refueling station, and fifteen Imperial warships making up the Third Imperial Fleet. Their duty was to guard the Alderson Points leading to Imperial worlds, such as Tabletop, as well as Sauron herself. The Fleet was strong enough to stop the Saurons from using the St. Ekaterina tramline, and their presence insured that some enemy squadron would not Jump into Wayforth System to disrupt traffic or cause other mischief.

  Since the war had heated up, commercial traffic had slowed down to a crawl. They were lucky to see two freighters a standard month; unlike before the war when there’d be that many incoming per day. The worst thing about living aboard Wayforth Station, besides the isolation, was loneliness. At best, Basov was an isolator with little interest in women. He’d never understood the opposite sex and probably never would; not that there were many aboard the station. Just three women and two of them were old enough to be his mother. The third was married to the military attaché and off-limits; even if he’d had designs in that area. If it weren’t for his hobby, he suspected he would go mad from sheer boredom.

  CoDominium era films were his passion, especially Twentieth Century Earth musicals and comedies. That era had been another filled with war, like his own: World War I and II, plus innumerable smaller actions. The station’s computer databank held almost all the surviving films from that era, some two hundred thousand films and television shows. They were his window into another more uncomplicated and simpler time.

  Tonight (or what they referred to as evening, based on Earth standard time) he would watch the Sound of Music. He didn’t always understand the movies, but he enjoyed their light-heartedness. Maybe it took the threat of global annihilation or death for a culture to produce great art. Unfortunately, he didn’t see much art in the Empire’s movies; the latest solidos were grim affairs and of no lasting significance—at least, in his opinion.

  He turned to look at the picture of Lysander V, the current Emperor; his stern visage looking down from the bulkhead behind him. Sometimes it felt as if the Emperor was watching his every move, which he found somewhat comforting. After all, someone had to watch over those whose job it was to protect and serve.

  There was a hesitant knock at his office door.

  “Come in,” he said, swiveling his chair to face the entranceway.

  The Head Science Officer, Nikolas Panagos, squeezed his way through the door frame. Panagos was grossly overweight. Even in the half-g of spin gravity, his flesh drooped off him like melted candlewax. His wan face, normally pale, was now almost bloodless and he was panting like a dog after a long run in the heat of Tanith’s sun.

  I’d better call the medical officer; Panagos looks as if he’s having a heart attack! “What’s the matter, Pan?” he asked. “Are you ill?”

  The fat man shook his head. “It’s not me, Chief. We’re getting some very strange readings—”

  “Saurons?!”

  “No, no. It’s some anomalous gravitational waves, orders of magnitude above anything we’ve ever recorded at the station—or anywhere else for that matter.”

  “So, what does that mean,” Basov asked. Science had never been his strong suit, even though one of Wayforth Station’s chartered duties was to study the universe. They had all kinds of telescopes, energy sensors and even a gravitational detector. “Is it something I should be worried about?”

  Panagos shook his head from side to side, causing his enormous dewlaps to ripple. His hobby was eating and, from all available evidence, he was quite good at it. “Chief, I don’t think so—”

  “Then what’s the problem?”

  “Chief, it may be a warning sign.”

  “What are you talking about Pan? We’re either in danger or we’re not.”

  “I’ve never seen or heard about such a high reading of gravitational waves.”

  “So?”

  “It’s where they’re coming from that’s worrisome. It’s Alpha Orionis.”

  Basov shrugged. He knew the names of some of the closer stars and systems, but there were so many… “What’s Alpha Orionis?”

/>   “It’s a red supergiant in the constellation of Orion of the spectral type M2Iab,” Panagos replied.

  “In normal Anglic, please,” Basov said. Science had not been one of his favorite subjects in school, but he’d picked up some astronomy just from being around all the astronomers at the station.

  Panagos nodded. “The star usually goes by the name Betelgeuse; it’s one of the most luminous stars in our galaxy. While a young star, Betelgeuse’s enormous energy requires that the star’s fuel be expended quickly compared to most stars. We also know that Betelgeuse is currently in a late stage of stellar evolution. Someday soon—astronomically speaking—the red giant will run out of fuel, collapse under its own weight and rebound in a spectacular supernova explosion. When this event occurs, which could be any time from today to a few million years in the future, Betelgeuse will brighten enormously for a few weeks or months, becoming as luminous and full as Rhinegold’s Star—or even much bigger!”

  “Then what’s the problem?” Basov asked. “It sounds like we’ve got lots of time.”

  There was actual sweat dripping from Panagos sparse hairline. “Because that’s a prediction—not a scientific fact, Chief. No one really knows when a star will go supernova. All we know for sure is that such explosions are preceded by high-energy gamma and X-rays.”

  “Are we getting any of those readings?” Basov inquired. He didn’t like the sound of “supernova” and remembered it had something to do with a star collapsing into a Black Hole and then spewing out all sorts of cosmic radiation and matter.

  The Head Scientist shook his head. “No, and thank Lysander we haven’t. If we were getting those readings, the explosion would already be in the past and the massive dose of gamma-rays only days away. It’s possible that the gravitation waves are caused by mass flows from the outer shell of Betelgeuse—”