THE DESTROYERMEN SERIES
Into the Storm
Crusade
Maelstrom
Distant Thunders
Rising Tides
Firestorm
Iron Gray Sea
Storm Surge
Deadly Shores
Straits of Hell
Blood in the Water
Devil’s Due
River of Bones
ACE
Published by Berkley
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375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014
Copyright © 2018 by Taylor Anderson
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Anderson, Taylor, 1963– author.
Title: River of bones / Taylor Anderson.
Description: First edition. | New York: ACE, 2018. | Series: Destroyermen; 13
Identifiers: LCCN 2017034498 (print) | LCCN 2017039392 (ebook) | ISBN 9780399587511 (Ebook) | ISBN 9780399587504 (hardcover)
Subjects: LCSH: Imaginary wars and battles—Fiction. | Destroyers (Warships)—Fiction. | GSAFD: Alternative histories (Fiction) | Science fiction.
Classification: LCC PS3601.N5475 (ebook) | LCC PS3601.N5475 R59 2018 (print) | DDC 813/.6—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017034498
First Edition: July 2018
Jacket art © Studio Liddell
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.
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CONTENTS
The Destroyermen Series
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
Acknowledgments
Maps and Illustrations
Author’s Note
Our History Here
PROLOGUE
CHAPTER 1
CHAPTER 2
CHAPTER 3
CHAPTER 4
CHAPTER 5
CHAPTER 6
CHAPTER 7
CHAPTER 8
CHAPTER 9
CHAPTER 10
CHAPTER 11
CHAPTER 12
CHAPTER 13
CHAPTER 14
CHAPTER 15
CHAPTER 16
CHAPTER 17
CHAPTER 18
CHAPTER 19
CHAPTER 20
CHAPTER 21
CHAPTER 22
CHAPTER 23
CHAPTER 24
CHAPTER 25
CHAPTER 26
CHAPTER 27
CHAPTER 28
CHAPTER 29
CHAPTER 30
CHAPTER 31
CHAPTER 32
EPILOGUE
Cast of Characters
Specifications
About the Author
TO MY FAMILY FOR UNDERSTANDING WHY, SOMETIMES, THEY HAVE TO SNEAK THROUGH THE HOUSE LIKE SOME TERRIBLE “BOOGER” MIGHT GET THEM IF THEY MAKE A PEEP. SADLY, SOMETIMES THEY’RE RIGHT. BUT AT LEAST THIS BOOGER IS BIG ENOUGH TO SAY “I’M SORRY.” I LOVE YOU ALL.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Thanks again to my friend and agent, Russell Galen, and my incredibly sweet, patient, and understanding editor, Anne Sowards. They’re the real crew that keeps this ship steaming along. I also have to thank all the great, imaginative folks who visit my website (taylorandersonauthor .com) and comment on the wide range of ongoing topics. (I’m sorry I forgot to mention Joe, Leo, “the Steves,” and “GSW” last time. . . .) Shoot, I probably forgot some more, and there’ll be a lot more by the time this hits. Nothing for it. But the point is, whether their ideas and suggestions inspire me or not, their participation and enthusiasm certainly do—as I’m sure they do the many other people who read their posts. (I’m the one with the counter. If they had any idea how many people hang on their every word, they’d probably clam up forever!)
Finally, I have to thank all of you out there who love this yarn as much as I do. Russell and Anne might keep the steam up, but you’re the ones who give me the fuel, inspiration, and motivation to keep dashing forward through rough seas or fair.
AUTHOR’S NOTE
A cast of characters and list of equipment specifications can be found at the end of this book.
OUR HISTORY HERE
By March 1, 1942, the war “back home” was a nightmare. Hitler was strangling Europe, and the Japanese were rampant in the Pacific. Most immediate from my perspective as a . . . mature Australian engineer stranded in Surabaya Java, the Japanese had seized Singapore and Malaysia, destroyed the American Pacific Fleet and neutralized their forces in the Philippines, conquered most of the Dutch East Indies, and were landing on Java. The one-sided Battle of the Java Sea had shredded ABDAFLOAT, a jumble of antiquated American, British, Dutch, and Australian warships united by the vicissitudes of war. Its destruction left the few surviving ships scrambling to slip past the tightening Japanese gauntlet. For most, it was too late.
With several other refugees, I managed to board an old American destroyer, USS Walker, commanded by Lieutenant Commander Matthew Reddy. Whether fate, providence, or mere luck intervened, Walker and her sister Mahan, their gallant destroyermen cruelly depleted by combat, were not fated for the same destruction that claimed their consorts in escape. Instead, at the height of a desperate action against the mighty Japanese battlecruiser Amagi, commanded by the relentless Hisashi Kurokawa, they were . . . engulfed by an anomalous force, manifested as a bizarre greenish squall—and their battered, leaking, war-torn hulks were somehow swept to another world entirely.
I say “another world” because, though geographically similar, there are few additional resemblances. It’s as if whatever cataclysmic event doomed the prehistoric life on “our” earth many millions of years ago never occurred, and those terrifying—fascinating—creatures endured, sometimes evolving down wildly different paths. We quickly discovered “people,” however, calling themselves Mi-Anakka, who are highly intelligent, social folk, with large eyes, fur, and expressive tails. In my ignorance and excitement, I promptly dubbed them Lemurians, based on their strong (if more feline) resemblance to the giant lemurs of Madagascar. (Growing evidence may confirm they sprang from a parallel line, with only the most distant ancestor connecting them to lemurs, but “Lemurians” has stuck.) We just as swiftly learned they were engaged in an existential struggle with a somewhat reptilian species commonly called Grik. Also bipedal, Grik display bristly crests and tail plumage, dreadful teeth and claws, and are clearly descended from the dromaeosaurids in our fossil record.
Aiding the first group against the second—Captain Reddy had no choice—we made fast, true friends who needed our technical expertise as badly as we needed their support. Conversely, we now also had an implacable enemy bent on devouring all competing life. Many bloody battles ensued while we struggled to help our friends against their far more numerous foes, and it is for this reason I sometimes think—when disposed to contemplate “destiny”—that we survived all our previous ordeals and somehow came to this place. I don’t know everything about anything, but I do know a little about a lot. The same was true of Captain Reddy and his US Asiatic Fleet sailors. We immediately commenced trying to even the odds, but militarizing the generally peaceful Lemurians was no simple task. Still, to paraphrase, the prospect of being eaten does focus one’s efforts amazingly, and dire necessity is the mother of industrialization. To this day, I remain amazed by what we accomplished so quickly with so little, especially considering how rapidly and tragically our “brain trust” was consumed by battle.
In the meantime, we discovered other humans—friends and enemies—who joined our cause, required our aid, or posed new threats. Even worse than the Grik (from a moral perspective, in my opinion) was the vile Dominion in South and Central America. A perverse mix of Incan/Aztecan blood-ritual tyranny with a dash of seventeeth-century Catholicism favoring technology brought by earlier travelers, the Dominion’s aims were similar to those of the Grik: conquest, of course, but founded on the principle “Convert or die.”
I now believe that if faced with only one of these enemies, we could’ve prevailed rather quickly despite the odds. Burdened by both, we could never concentrate our forces and the war lingered on. To make matters worse, the Grik were aided by the madman Kurokawa, who, after losing his Amagi at the Battle of Baalkpan, pursued a warped agenda all his own. And just as we came to the monumental conclusion that not all historical human timelines we encountered exactly mirrored ours, we began to feel the malevolent presence of yet another power, centered in the Mediterranean. This League of Tripoli was composed of fascist French, Italian, Spanish, and German factions from a different 1939 than we remembered, and hadn’t merely “crossed over” with a pair of battle-damaged destroyers but possessed a powerful task force originally intended to wrest Egypt—and the Suez Canal—from Great Britain.
We had few open conflicts with the League at first, though they seemed inexplicably intent on subversion. Eventually we discovered their ultimate aim was to aid Kurokawa, the Grik, even the Dominion, just enough to ensure our mutual annihilation, and simultaneously remove multiple threats to the hegemony they craved. But their schemes never reckoned on the valor of our allies or the resolve of Captain Matthew Reddy. Therefore, when their Contre-Amiral Laborde, humiliated by a confrontation, not only sank what was, essentially, a hospital ship with his monstrous dreadnaught Savoie, but also took hostages—including Captain Reddy’s pregnant wife—and turned them AND Savoie over to Kurokawa, we were caught horribly off guard. Tensions with the League escalated dramatically, though not enough to risk open hostilities that neither we—nor they—were ready for. (We later learned such had already occurred in the Caribbean, between USS Donaghey and a League DD, and that 2nd Fleet and General Shinya’s force had suffered a setback in the Americas at the hands of the Dominion.) But we had to deal definitively with Kurokawa at last, and do so at once. As powerful as he’d become, and with a battleship added to his fleet, we simply couldn’t risk our invasion of Grik Africa with him at our backs.
Captain Reddy conceived a brilliant plan to rescue our friends and destroy Kurokawa once and for all, and in a rare fit of cosmic justice, the operation actually proceeded better than planned, resulting in the removal of one long-standing threat forever, and the capture of Savoie herself. The battle was painfully costly, however, and the forces involved too exhausted and ill placed to respond when word came that the Grik were on the move. It became clear that all our hopes for victory depended on a heretofore reluctant ally; how quickly we (and Shinya) could repair, reorganize, and rearm; and the insanely, suicidally daring defiance of some very dear friends aboard the old Santa Catalina. . . .
Excerpt from the foreword to Courtney Bradford’s The Worlds I’ve Wondered University of New Glasgow Press, 1956
PROLOGUE
“To the cookpots with any who fall out!” gasped Jash, heaving his burden along with the rest of his warriors. He was a Senior First of One Hundred, now sometimes referred to by the odd-sounding words Taii or Ka’tan, and commanded three hundred of First General Regent Champion Esshk’s New Warriors. The New Warriors were still sometimes derisively called the hatchling host by long-established regents and the elite Hij of Old Sofesshk, which was the First City and old/new capital of the Ghaarrichk’k Empire in Africa. But they had been schooled from birth in the radical new ways of the Hunt and were the best equipped, best trained, most lethal warriors the Grik ever made, all for the purpose of this Final Swarm they were about to embark upon. Their mission was to slaughter a most tiresome “worthy prey” once and for all, a prey that had made the Grik prey for the first time since before their racial memory began, and was now threatening the holy city of Sofesshk itself.
Jash knew all this, or most of it, as well as the fact that he owed his rank—probably his very life—to the military reforms of First General Esshk and not, also for the first time in history, to the Celestial Mother, or Giver of Life, who ruled the empire in name. This was particularly remarkable for a warrior not quite three years old, with precisely zero combat experience and who was only beginning to sprout the bristly crest of adulthood on his head. Like many his age, raised as he was, it was his intellect that so quickly elevated him to the exalted rank of First of One Hundred, then Senior (Ka’tan), and he was very clever for a Grik not “of the blood.” Under normal circumstances, even if he’d survived the cannibalistic melee of traditional hatchlinghood in the nest, he would’ve risked being arbitrarily sent to the cookpots by some disinterested chooser. If he avoided that, the best he could’ve hoped for was a brief, brutal life as an ordinary Uul warrior or laborer. He owed everything to Esshk, he believed, and it was for the Regent Champion that Jash felt the urgency of (and responsibility for) completing his current task in the allotted time—whether or not he fully understood why his three hundred warriors must carry the inverted weight of a seventy-foot, eighteen-ton wooden galley to the waters of Lake Nalak, west of Sofesshk.
“The warriors tire, Senior,” another First of One Hundred, named Seech, wheezed beside him, hacking a gobbet of dust-stained mucus on the ground. He didn’t add that they were thirsty as well. He didn’t have to. They’d been carrying the galley all night, down twisty trails in the vine-choked brush south of the lake, from the place it had been hidden from view from above ever since the prey, the . . . enemy, discovered the covered slips on the lake. To prevent their destruction, all the galleys—maybe twenty or thirty hundreds; Jash had no idea—were quickly carried ashore or sunk in shallow water. Most were stashed in places it was hoped the enemy flying machines wouldn’t look, but some were even buried. The latter didn’t fare well, quickly rotting in the living soil, but all this was accomplished none too soon, since the enemy returned a few days later with more flying machines and bombed the slips into a roaring inferno. As far as anyone could tell, however, they hadn’t found any galleys, and rarely diverted their efforts from bombing more obvious targets bordering the lake and the Zambezi River.
Jash glanced at Seech, one of only thirty-odd under his command that even had a name. Names were earned by rank or achievement, and only Firsts of Ten, Fifty, or a Hundred had them yet. Looking harder, Jash realized it was dawn at last, because he saw Seech’s tongue lolling from his tooth-studded jaws, moisture around his red eyes made muddy with dust, the young plumage on his tail dragging the ground. The gray armor and tunic over his dun-colored feathery fur wasn’t stained with sweat, but they’d crossed several streams, and the dark dust had stuck. Somehow he’d kept his
weapons clean; that was something whipped into them since infancy. There was dust on the shiny-bright barrel of his musket (called a “garrak” for the loud sound it made, and because the near-lipless Grik couldn’t do Ms)—but there wasn’t a speck of rust. Jash expected nothing less. He and Seech had been nestmates and, according to the old way, would’ve torn each other apart if they could have. Prevented from that and raised together, they’d developed a certain . . . fellow-feeling between them that was difficult to define. Jash was smarter, and Seech expected him to display wise leadership. Seech was possibly stronger, and Jash relied on him to swiftly enforce his commands. Being closer to the ranks, Seech was also expected to have a better feel for what the warriors could endure. The relationship worked, and Jash knew Seech wouldn’t have spoken at all if their warriors didn’t absolutely require a rest.
“Very well,” he panted, then called a halt with a loud, guttural bark. “Hold them here,” he said, “but do not allow them to lay their burden down.” He hesitated. Able to do simple sums, he’d calculated that each of his warriors had been supporting upwards of 120 pounds with their arms and heads since dusk the night before. “They may never lift it again,” he added resignedly. “I will look at the trail ahead.” He nodded at the peak of the rise they’d been working toward.
“As you command,” Seech huffed.
Jash stepped out from under the bow of the galley, his arms and legs suddenly rubbery, and staggered several steps before firming his stride. Looking back, he saw the graying, raw wood bottom of the galley and wondered how badly it would leak when it touched the water again. For the first time, from his slightly elevated perch, he observed dozens more upturned hulls snaking back the way they’d come like a line of huge grayback beetles drawn to carrion. He resumed his trek to the top of the rise, where he stopped and stared, breathing hard.
Before him, stretching almost as far as he could see, the opposite mountain shore a hazy smudge of darkness against the brightening horizon, was Lake Nalak at last. He’d seen the lake many times, of course, and it always had a few of the great iron-covered ships lying at anchor or moving smokily about its surface. Now it was packed, and he’d never seen it so densely covered with anything other than the fat, floating, flying creatures that teemed there twice a year. There were iron-covered ships to be sure, more than he’d imagined existed, and most were chuffing columns of dark smoke high in the calm orangish morning air. But hundreds of galleys were already on the water as well, some rowing east, forty oars on either side flashing in the bright light of the rising sun. It was then that Jash fully grasped the scope of the undertaking of which he was such an insignificant part.
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