Table of Contents
NOTE TO READERS REGARDING THIS VOLUME’S CONTENTS
BALANCE POINTONE
TWO
THREE
FOUR
FIVE
SIX
SEVEN
EIGHT
NINE
TEN
ELEVEN
TWELVE
THIRTEEN
FOURTEEN
FIFTEEN
SIXTEEN
SEVENTEEN
EIGHTEEN
NINETEEN
TWENTY
TWENTY-ONE
TWENTY-TWO
TWENTY-THREE
TWENTY-FOUR
TWENTY-FIVE
TWENTY-SIX
TWENTY-SEVEN
TWENTY-EIGHT
TWENTY-NINE
THIRTY
THIRTY-ONE
THIRTY-TWO
THIRTY-THREE
THIRTY-FOUR
THIRTY-FIVE
THIRTY-SIX
THIRTY-SEVEN
THIRTY-EIGHT
THIRTY-NINE
FORTY
FORTY-ONE
FORTY-TWO
FORTY-THREE
AFTERWORD
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
MOLE HUNT
Balance Point
Robert Buettner
The balance point of interplanetary Cold War II between Earth and monolithic Yavet tips unexpectedly toward peace. Covert ops Captain Jazen Parker and his sharp shooting lover and partner Kit Born slide from world saving hazardous duty to escorting a telepathic alien monster home from Earth to mate. And the two of them are forced to consider a quiet domestic future together.
But when old enemies’ thirsts for power and revenge, Jazen’s problematic past, and his former girlfriend, upset Jazen and Kit’s personal balance point, the two cold warriors find their relationship, and their very survival, tested as never before.
Lost in space, and from one another, they must each penetrate Yavet, the universe’s most insular and repressive world, then foil a plot that could turn Cold War II hot and nuclear—or die trying.
Baen Books by
Robert Buettner
Overkill
Undercurrents
Balance Point
BALANCE POINT
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.
Copyright © 2014 by Robert Buettner
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: 978-1-4767-3644-0
eISBN: 978-1-62579-268-6
Cover art by Justin Adams
First Baen printing, April 2014
Distributed by Simon & Schuster
1230 Avenue of the Americas
New York, NY 10020
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Buettner, Robert.
Balance point / Robert Buettner.
pages cm. -- (Orphan's legacy ; 3)
"A Baen Books original"--T.p. verso.
ISBN 978-1-4767-3644-0 (pbk.)
1. Life on other planets--Fiction. 2. Space warfare--Fiction. I. Title.
PS3602.U344B35 2014
813'.6--dc23
2014000099
Printed in the United States of America
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
Electronic Version by Baen Books
www.baen.com
NOTE TO READERS REGARDING THIS VOLUME’S CONTENTS
Robert Buettner’s short story, “Mole Hunt,” is included in this volume after the end of Balance Point. “Mole Hunt” was originally published electronically, as a Baen Free Library short story in 2011.
Readers need not have read “Mole Hunt” first in order to fully enjoy and understand Balance Point. The events detailed in “Mole Hunt” are summarized where, and in as much detail as, necessary in Balance Point.
However, the events detailed in “Mole Hunt” occur in the Orphan’s Legacy series time line before Balance Point and after series book 2, Undercurrents.
“Mole Hunt” is placed in this volume after Balance Point because “Mole Hunt” was written as a stand-alone short story, differs radically in style and viewpoint from Balance Point, and depicts no characters who appear elsewhere in the Orphan’s Legacy series.
For Emily, and for Rob
Most students of superpower relations know that the balance point between detente and Armageddon is a razor’s edge. Few realize how often that edge has been as slim as the survival odds of a single spy.
—Vladimir Yefimovich Semichastny,
Chairman of the KGB
throughout the Cuban Missile Crisis
of October, 1962
ONE
The pilot on my left tapped my shoulder as his voice crackled in my headset. “Captain Parker? There, sir!”
I looked where his gloved finger pointed. Twenty degrees right of the tilt-wing’s nose, five miles distant, an oily black rope writhed between the ground and the sky. The smoke tied together the South Georgia swamp below us and the low cloud ceiling beneath which we raced.
“Fire? Why the hell is there fire?”
“Flame thrower, sir. Apparently the animal doesn’t like ’em.”
I shook my head and swore. Of course “the animal” didn’t like ’em. No being in its right mind liked burning alive. “What idiot thought that up?”
“I just fly the bird, sir.” The pilot banked the tilt-wing toward the smoke. He had never overflown this place before and knew only what he’d been told through his headset during the last two hours. His tilt-wing was a regular Army trainer that had been diverted in flight from Ft. Stewart, a couple hundred miles northeast, because it was the only available vertical take-off and landing aircraft near enough to pick me up in a shopping center parking lot, then drop me off, that was also clearable into restricted airspace.
The pilot leveled the ship and settled it toward a landing pad. The pad was just a rectangle where the scrub had been scraped back to expose bare soil. At one corner an orange wind sock flapped from a pole. A ground-level breeze now carried the smoke from the fire across the pad like a shroud four hundred yards long.
Two turret-variant hellcats idled at the pad’s edge. Each ‘cat’s roof was stenciled “OCWTRS,” an acronym for “Okefenokee Chemical Weapons Test Range Security.” Of course, the eighty-three square miles of muggy Federal scrub woodland and restricted airspace that surrounded the pad had never seen a chemical weapon, unless you counted that flame thrower.
But the skull-and-crossbones signs on the barbed wire fencing and the overflight restrictions advisories on aerial maps discouraged the curious. The ‘cats with their turret guns, and automated triple-A ‘bot batteries along the range perimeter, discouraged the more-than-curious.
Half hidden in the trees bordering the pad, a boxy command and control hovertank hunched like a plasteel porcupine, its roof bristling with swept-back antennas.
On the pad another tilt-wing, like the one that was delivering me, but spook-black, already squatted on its landing gear alongside the vehicles. A command-and-control communications pod bulged from its back like a tumor.
“Looks like there’s some brass on the ground already, sir. Guess you could ask them about the fire.”
The tilt-wing’s props were still blowing at landing pitch when I dropped through the belly hatch and ran, eyes slitted against the dust and smoke, to the command slider. The air smelled of seared wood
and jellied gasoline.
As the tilt-wing that had hauled me in lifted off, a personal security detail corporal, posted alongside the slider’s rear hatch, recognized me, saluted, then jerked his head at the command vehicle. “The Old Man’s waiting for you in the slider, Captain Parker.”
Inside the red-lit command slider only one person sat, back to me, hunched at one of the flatscreen consoles.
The rest of the consoles were dark and unattended. “Where is everybody, Howard?”
General Howard Hibble, AKA The Old Man, AKA The King of the Spooks, didn’t turn around, but in the reflection of his face off the screen I saw his gray eyebrows flick up. “Inauguration Day’s a federal holiday. If you hadn’t been moping around for the last week you’d know that, Jazen.”
Howard Hibble was the longest-serving general officer in the history of the United States Army, but not because he was conventional. He had been a professor before the Slug War, was commissioned as an intelligence officer during the Blitz, and had run his spooks his way ever since. His way included being called by his first name by everybody, and an every-day-is-casual-Friday dress code that would choke any drill sergeant. Howard’s way also included knowing more about the personality balance point between the two individuals who made up each of his officer pairs than a marriage counselor knew about her clients.
In fact I had taken accumulated leave to mope after Kit left. Not just because I missed waking up beside her. Case officer pairs, whether het or monogender, typically bond closer than married couples, but separation is a job requirement of military life. The trouble with this particular separation was that Kit’s job required her to spend two weeks in Paris without me, because the man in charge of the trip preferred I disappear from her life. And he happened to be her father.
I said, “It’s my leave. I can mope if I want. I’ve still got more time accumulated than I can use.”
With a bony hand Howard twisted the handlebar of the little scooter he rode around on—they didn’t call him “The Old Man” for nothing—and faced me. “It is, you can, and you do. I assume you’re seeing her this weekend.”
“If I can still rent an outfit. You kidnapped me in the tux shop parking lot before I got in the door.”
He adjusted the old-fashioned wire rimmed glasses that hung on his wrinkled face and stared at my jeans. “Wear your dress whites instead.”
I eyed his wrinkled flannel shirt. “What do you know about the dress code for black-tie parties?”
“As little as a man who’s survived four decades in Washington can. But I know you. You’ll be less intimidated in your own skin.” Howard shrugged as he spun back to the console and tapped up the screen image. “I didn’t send that tilt-wing so I could give you relationship counseling.”
I peered over his shoulder.
The screen showed a crowbot overhead, real time, visible light, displaying two hundred by two hundred yards. Dismounted infantry, probably the squad that normally patrolled the range’s perimeter aboard the two parked hellcats, were deployed on line, prone behind the cover of a shallow ridge at the screen’s left, west, edge.
I guessed that when things had gone bad they had been pulled off perimeter patrol. The command slider probably had been rolled out from The Barn on auto and rendezvoused with Howard’s hunchback when it landed.
The infantry were all armored up in full Eternads, and two of the GIs had flamer tanks strapped on their suits’ backs.
Fifty yards to the squad’s front, brush and scrub burned. The smoke plume now drifted south, forming a concealing barrier at ground level between the squad and anything beyond the smoke that depended on visible light to see. The Okefenokee is damp terrain, even around its edges, and the fire looked to be burning itself out.
On the other side of the smoke screen, the hovering crowbot’s feed highlighted three biologics among the trees.
The first biologic, twenty yards beyond the fire, was another GI in Eternads, lying face up. Fifteen feet from him lay a twisted metal lump that had once been the tanks and hose of a back-mounted flamer. Just beyond the trashed flamer were two larger lumps. They remained barely recognizable as a utility-variant hellcat and its flatbed trailer, both now mangled and overturned, impellers to the sky.
The GI lay motionless, and at first I assumed he was dead. But his suit vitals shimmered in orange digits displayed on the screen alongside his image. They were normal, except for elevated heart rate and respiration, which were hardly surprising considering his circumstances.
I nodded to myself. Playing dead was a logical strategy.
His circumstances were defined by the other two biologics on the screen. The first, according to the vitals displayed alongside it, was a newly dead, but still warm, truck-sized animal carcass. One of its six legs had been torn off and lay alongside the limp body, and its neck had been wrenched so that its rack haloed its head like a spiked wreath.
I pointed at a shredded harness that had tethered the recently deceased animal to the trailer. “I assume that’s his Christmas turkey woog?”
Howard nodded, then frowned. “Normally, that makes his day.”
I nodded back.
Woog were more-or-less antelope, but six-legged, bigger than elephants, and not native to South Georgia. Very not native. Downgraded Earthlike 476, known to everybody except its tourism bureau as Dead End, was about as far from South Georgia as the human race had gotten so far.
Dead End harbored a Carbon 12-based fauna so biochemically dissimilar to Earth’s that feeding an Earth animal’s flesh to a Dead End carnivore was like feeding sand to a lion. So, in order to nourish OCWTRS’ one and only guest, Howard’s xenobiologic nerds had bred, here on Earth, a herd of woog.
The nerds found that the docile, Earth-bred woogs provided dandy nourishment, but failed to offer the “robustly combative dining experience” provided to a grezzen when he chased down a natural-born wild woog back home on Dead End.
The Army has its faults, but it spares no expense to give remotely deployed GIs a taste of home. You may get your Christmas turkey dinner in a bunker, but you will get it. So, on each federal holiday, one of which was the inauguration day of the United States President, the Army, driven by force of habit, imported one live free-range woog, all the way across the ten jumps between Dead End and Earth, as a dietary change of pace for South Georgia’s most voracious tourist.
I squinted at the third organic on the screen, which was the intended beneficiary of the Army’s generosity. Unlike the possum-playing GI game warden who had delivered the woog, the grezzen was very much in motion. As I watched, the grezzen uprooted a thirty-foot cypress with a paw swipe that spun the tree through the air as if an eleven-ton, six legged ochre grizzly bear had swatted a salmon out of a stream. The grezzen spun like a dog chasing its tail, sprang twenty yards in a single bound to another cypress, then splintered it, too.
“Howard, what’s got up his ass?”
Howard shook his head. “Don’t know. That warden lost his helmet audio before he could elaborate.”
“He’s lucky he didn’t lose his helmet and the head in it. He knows better than to use his flamer. Does that relief squad know enough to hold their fire?”
“Well, I hope so.”
I blew out a breath. A dithering professor hoped his students knew what to do. A four-star general made sure they knew, then motivated them to do it. Intelligence was an unconventional business, and Howard’s resumé spoke for itself, but there were times when running a military organization like a Socratic-method graduate seminar was idiotic.
I stepped to the hatch. “I’m going over there, Howard.”
“Take the hellcat on the left. There’s an Eternad suit in your size in the right-hand seat.”
I had already slid behind the hellcat’s control yoke when I realized that, for a dithering professor, Howard Hibble excelled at motivating people to risk their lives without even asking them to. At least the gullible ones. Who never seemed to learn.
“God
damn you, Howard.” I shifted the ‘cat into drive and steered toward the smoke.
TWO
Ten minutes later I left the hellcat idling at the base of the ridge, and low-crawled up alongside the squad leader where he lay in the middle of the line. Howard had radioed ahead that I was coming. The sergeant’s visor was up, and when he turned and saw my civvies, his eyes widened.
He shouted to be heard over the grezzen, which bellowed beyond the smoke. “Where’s your armor, Captain Parker?”
I shook my head. “I’ve seen grezz claws cut main battle tank armor. There’s no point.” The sergeant was new, and it was as much of the truth as he needed to know. “What do you make the range now, Sarge?”
He glanced up at his visor display. “Three hundred yards, sir. The animal’s moved farther east since we got here. Running out of trees to punch, I guess.”
I squinted at the smoke and saw nothing. Maybe I should have armored up just to access the snoops and visor data. “The warden out there. It’s Buford? And he’s still down?”
“Yes, sir. I suppose he’s waiting until the animal gets farther away before he makes a run for it.”
I shrugged. This squad leader was on duty because the experienced security troops had holiday passes. A grezz can cover sixty yards in a bound and sustain seventy miles per hour across open country. There was no making a run for it, and the warden and I knew it even if the newbie didn’t.
I levered myself up, stood and brushed damp soil off my civvies while I stared into the smoke.
The squad leader’s eyes widened again. “Sir?”
“I’ll walk over there and have a look.”
Balance Point Page 1
