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The Helverti Invasion

John Dalmas

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.

thereof in any form.

A Baen Books Original

Baen Publishing Enterprises

P.O. Box 1403

Riverdale, NY 10471

www.baen.com

ISBN: 0-7434-7169-5

Cover art by Bob Eggleton

Interior map by Randy Asplund

First printing, November 2003

Distributed by Simon & Schuster

1230 Avenue of the Americas

New York, NY 10020

Typeset by Bell Road Press, Sherwood, OR

Produced by Windhaven Press, Auburn, NH

Printed in the United States of America

This book is dedicated to

Ruth Beebe Hill and her Dakotah collaborator Chunksa Yuha, for her novel

Hanta Yo, a historically rooted epic of the Grizzly band of the Dakotah,

1794-1835

David Matheson, a Schee-chu-umsh traditional, raised on the Coeur

d'Alene reservation in a traditional family, for his novel of the pre-contact

Schee-chu-umsh

and to

Tony Hillerman, a white-eyes like myself, for his numerous novels of the

contemporary Navajo that have provided my wife and me with much

pleasure and many insights

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

My thanks to the following writers for critiquing this at one or another

stage of development: Jim Glass, Patty Briggs, Mary Jane Engh, Kathie

Healy, and Bob Lovely. And to the Spokane Word Weavers for listening

to, reading and critiquing a number of chapters.

BAEN BOOKS by JOHN DALMAS

The Lizard War

The Helverti Invasion

The Puppet Master

Soldiers

The Regiment

The White Regiment

The Regiment's War

The Three Cornered War

The Lion of Farside

The Bavarian Gate

Part One

ROOTS

Vision Quest

Trail-worn and half-starved, Mazeppa slipped through the undergrowth. His

face, body, limbs, recently shaved head, all bore what was left of medicine

paint. Its symbols were to help on his vision quest-a very unusual vision

quest-and only incidentally served as camouflage.

He was pursued by the shrieks of a blue jay in a giant silver maple. "Man!

Man! Man!" it shrieked. "Man! Man! Man!" Mazeppa ignored the racket,

and settled onto his belly beside a growth of red osier on the riverbank.

After a bit, when he failed to move again, the jay's clamor became erratic,

confused, as if the bird had forgotten what it was shouting about. Finally

the youth heard its departing wing beats. Somewhere on the terrace

behind and above him, a nest of baby robins renewed their querulous cries

for food. A parent began sharp, demanding chirps. A little later there was

the sound of wings again-one mate returning to the nest, the other

departing.

For a time, the only sound besides the peeping nestlings was the barely

perceptible murmur of the Misasip: the soft drag of its current along the

bank, the faint play of interweaving eddies and subcurrents. The youth's

empty belly no longer distracted him as it had the first days, and at a

subliminal level each sound registered. He heard it all, understood it all,

ignored it all. Had there been a hint of anything worrisome, it would have

caught his attention. Meanwhile he simply watched the great river.

Upstream on the far side, another sizeable river joined its waters to the

Misasip. At the juncture was an area of many structures, a walled town,

and rising within it on the high bank, a higher enclosure of stone, with

towers. Mazeppa knew of the great town, and of the towered enclosure

called Palace. When he was a little boy, a wandering storyteller had

stopped among the people and told of it.

Briefly Mazeppa examined it. Then, on the Misasip itself, a great raft

came into view, riding the current, a broad tent near its center. Men lay or

moved languidly about. On the stern a man stood holding a long pole that

trailed in the water, a very long paddle, Mazeppa realized, for steering. As

the raft passed, some hundred yards out, a long canoe overtook it from

behind, driven by twenty paddlers, their strokes slow and synchronized.

As it overtook the raft, men shouted back and forth. Briefly the raft's

steersman sculled as if to keep ahead, but after a few powerful strokes he

stopped, his cheerful call belying the fist he shook.

Shortly both craft disappeared downstream. Soon another great canoe

appeared, this one from the south, moving slowly upstream, its paddlers

digging more quickly, but still synchronized. It too had a tent near the

middle. It seemed to Mazeppa a great chief must lie in its shade, perhaps

napping. He watched it approach and pass. After a bit, it landed below the

enclosure's high stone walls, and men disembarked.

Leaving Mazeppa alone by the hypnotically murmuring river, sunlight

dazzling on its water. After an indeterminate time of near-trance, a voice

spoke to him, not in his ears but in his mind. He'd expected a voice, but

this one? It was, he realized, the voice of Jesus. "Mazeppa," it told him,

"someday you will rule all this, you and your people. All of it: the great

river and the land along it. Including the great town, and Palace, and all

they contain. It is what you were born for."

* * *

Then Mazeppa slept. When he awoke, the sun was behind him, low,

missing the water entirely, glowing gold on the treetops along the distant

bank. Where he lay, dusk was settling. Quietly he crept backward, away

from the shore, quietly got to his feet, and quietly returned to his tethered

pony, which had spent the day browsing the undergrowth within its reach.

Despite days of fasting, Mazeppa vaulted onto its back, ready to return

home, no longer a boy, a man now, his vision quest completed. He'd ride

west as he'd ridden east, following or paralleling the great trail the Sotans

had beaten in the earth with their comings and goings.

And mostly he would ride by night, for in this land he was the enemy. Ride

watchfully, listening, his nostrils reading the air, and not just for danger.

Because now his fast was over, and it was time to kill and eat. There

would be something: a porcupine feeding audibly in a treetop, the smell of

its careless evacuations rank in the still night air; or a beaver taking

advantage of the darkness, dragging a branch to a streambank. Then he

would dismount, string his bow, nock an arrow and wait, letting his eyes

find the target if they could. Wait till dawn if need be. And after he had

killed, thanked his prey and eaten, he would lie up in a thicket well away

from the Sotan trail, and sleep, to dream whatever after-dreams might

follow Jesus's message. Lie up till sunset. The moon would be halfway up

the eastern sky then, mostly full, and he could travel swiftly.

From Galactics 202

Studies in Cosmology

Parallel universes are not generated randomly or regularly. They result

when a sophont chooses, knowingly or not, between alternative actions of

sufficiently effective differences.

Like a stone thrown into a pond, the results of choice propagate outward

in what can be likened to a ripple effect. But unless the matric location is

suitably unstable and the initiating decision suits the circumstances, the

difference will not maintain itself against the tendency toward the

conservation of established universes. The separation does not

perpetuate, and only one of the two alternatives continues.

But if the changes are potent enough, "parallel" universes result, or

"divergent" universes, if you prefer. (We deal in metaphor here.) Neither

universe has any material trace of the other. However, the causal complex

persists for a considerable period as shadow events. Thus adepts, by

focusing on the divergence zone, can discern and penetrate the event

cloud. And with sufficient knowledge of pre-event conditions, can give

those perceptions context, and to a degree, identity. In fact, it is by

recording the deep-questioning of adepts that the following reconstruction

has been assembled.

* * *

In year 1983 of the Terran Common Era, in what we can call the stem

universe, a sequence of political events and posturing led to an American

naval task force holding exercises in the vicinity of Korea. Within weeks,

the government of the Soviet Union replied with a large-scale

demonstration of naval power within five hundred miles of the Hawaiian

Islands.

Given the experience of 1941, the American Pacific Fleet was sent out to

confront it: a response sufficiently threatening, it was misread as an

impending attack. Ordered by Soviet Pacific Fleet Command, the Soviet

force commander ordered a single tactical nuclear missile launched to

destroy the American flagship. However, the order was incorrectly

transmitted, and all his missile ships fired.

The Soviet admiral, appalled by the error, immediately notified Moscow. At

the same time, an American satellite monitoring the confrontation reported

this multi-missile launch, and the U.S. responded immediately with a

launch not only against the Soviet task force, but against naval shore

targets in the Soviet Far East.

The Soviet chief executive, Yuri V. Andropov, had acted almost as quickly.

Assuming the Americans would launch a wider-ranging nuclear response

than they actually did, he ordered an ICBM attack on numerous strategic

American targets. This massive launch was reported promptly, and the

Americans raised the ante "while they still could."

The critical mistransmission of the Soviet admiral's firing order resulted

from a choice made by the admiral's signalman-to covertly drink ethanol

on watch. It was the kind of choice made innumerable times at every

moment in every universe, but this one occurred at a time and place of

extreme pregnancy. The result was a space-time bifurcation, and two

resultant universes. In one, the drink was taken, in the other it wasn't.

In each, choices made during the next few minutes created a veritable

spray of incipient new universes. This seems to be characteristic in the

violent decline of sapient life forms. In the universe of interest here, which

we will call Universe Terra One, hundreds of fusion warheads exploded in

the atmosphere and on the surface. The possibility of such a war had

been foreseen. Scientists had predicted not only extensive shock wave

and radiation damage, but extensive urban, forest and grass fires; a

resulting major increase in albedo that would take years to decline to

pre-war normal; the effective destruction of planetary technical

infrastructures, including food production and transportation; enormous

direct and indirect human fatalities; and the collapse of law and order.

Their predictions, however, were not met. Instead, an unforeseen effect

resulted which still is not understood: a major imbalance in the local

sector of the underlying creativity matrix. Which was promptly adjusted by

the effective erasure of the still localized universe of the cataclysm, that is,

its morphing into one in which Terra differed from its precursor in some but

by no means all respects. In it, many effects of then-recent Terran history

disappeared, remaining only as more or less vague memories in the

surviving, ethnically redistributed sophonts. Sophonts confused not only

by the new and unexplainable world they found themselves in, but by

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