Tyger Burning Read online

  Table of Contents

  BOOK ONE When the Sommen Came

  CHAPTER ONE

  CHAPTER TWO

  CHAPTER THREE

  CHAPTER FOUR

  CHAPTER FIVE

  CHAPTER SIX

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  BOOK TWO CHAPTER NINE

  CHAPTER TEN

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  BOOK THREE CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

  CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

  Tyger Burning

  T.C. McCarthy

  NEW MILITARY SF. Humanity had just begun its first tentative steps towards conquering the Solar System when the aliens came and took it all away. Then they disappeared, leaving only wreckage in their wake. They have given us 100 years to get ready for the next phase of their invasion. They expect us to fight fair. But if one man can learn to control his combat implants, humanity might just have a hope for a free future…

  Maung is used to being hunted. As the last "dream warrior," a Burmese military unit whose brains are more machine than grey matter, everyone wants him dead—punished for the multiple atrocities his unit committed during war.

  But when an alien race makes its presence known on Earth and threatens to annihilate mankind, it gives Maung a chance to escape. Maung abandons his family on Earth to hide in the farthest reaches of the Solar System. There he finds love, his fellow Burmese countrymen exiled to labor on a prison asteroid, and the horrors of a war long since finished.

  Maung also discovers a secret weapon system - one lost for almost a generation and which may help his people redeem themselves while at the same time saving the human race. War will come. But with Maung's discoveries and 100 years to prepare, maybe the Earth can be ready...

  Tyger Burning

  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 © 2019 by T.C. McCarthy

  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: 978-1-4814-8410-7

  eISBN: 978-1-62579-721-6

  Cover art by Dominic Harman

  First Baen printing, July 2019

  Distributed by Simon & Schuster

  1230 Avenue of the Americas

  New York, NY 10020

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Names: McCarthy, T.C., author.

  Title: Tyger burning / T.C. McCarthy.

  Description: Riverdale, NY : Baen, 2019.

  Identifiers: LCCN 2019008809 | ISBN 9781481484107 (paperback)

  Subjects: | BISAC: FICTION / Science Fiction / Adventure. | FICTION / Science

  Fiction / General. | GSAFD: Science fiction.

  Classification: LCC PS3613.C3563 T94 2019 | DDC 813/.6--dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019008809

  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

  BOOK ONE

  “Tyger, tyger, burning bright . . .” —William Blake

  When the Sommen Came

  Lev reminded himself to keep his head bowed and to avoid staring. An entire mob passed, all of them wearing combat suits, many patched to the point where he wondered if the garments had any chance of protecting their wearers but protection wasn’t really the point—not for the Sommen. The more patched, the greater the warrior. That was the point.

  One of the soldiers kicked as it walked by, sending Lev into a drift of ammonia snow, fine and dry. “No-name, keep your head lower.”

  No-name.

  “Don’t let it get to you,” said Michael, helping Lev back to his feet. “And I know your name.” They glanced down the road, in both directions, to confirm that no more Sommen were in sight before resuming their commute.

  “How many more resupplies?” Michael asked.

  Lev sighed. “One.”

  “One? Imagine. Soon you’ll be like that old Lupan Merchant. I forget his name, but you know the one: barking orders as though born to the Merchant class, more Sommen than the Sommen themselves. It’s good that you’re so lucky because you’re the only other human in our group and we’re both from Zaporozhye, so that has to mean something—like we wound up together and we’re both still alive. Luck is with us.”

  Lev didn’t feel lucky; he felt old—old enough to remember what it had been like on ten different worlds, his pressure suit replaced three times, twice barely repaired in time to seal in the oxygen. He flexed the right gauntlet and winced. His knuckles had gotten worse in the last few months, the suit’s wrist joints were too tight and a slight whiff of ammonia tainted his oxygen with maybe some methane, and Lev forgot if the contamination caused arthritis but that’s what he blamed; old age often had an accomplice. Everything blurred now. It was better to not think, better to forget that at the end of this run he’d have what he came for: Sommen Merchant status, and with it? A name. Lev banished the dream as soon as it materialized. Too many things could happen in no man’s land, so many opportunities for the misfortunes of age, and he hadn’t seen Earth since he was twenty-five and had trouble remembering what it was that he missed; it bothered him, the lack of memories an infected splinter that he had to excise. Better to think of things lost—or better still, things lost and forgotten—than what could be gained in the future. The already lost never brought new disappointments.

  Vushka. The name triggered memories, the door to his past kicked in. These were his mother and father, crying, just before waving good-bye to watch Lev march across the steppes toward the waiting Sommen merchant fleet. This was his grandmother. Grinning, toothless, she poked the logs in her Lviv fireplace and wheezed in a hoarse laugh that made him smile and cringe at the same time, made him wonder if maybe she’d die on the spot and fall into the fire to be consumed and forgotten. Vushka. It was all his parents ate, all they fed him as a child, but then that wasn’t true because there were plenty of other foods but vushka was the only thing that Lev remembered these days, the only thing that ever came to him. And it was enough. Enough to invite other memories so he could recall his family just one more time, to accept the fact that by now they were dead.

  “Are you blind?” Michael hissed.

  Lev blinked. They had arrived at the outpost and a line of no-names gathered to wait, all of them showing their respect, all staring at him until Lev dropped to his knees.

  “Idiot,” said Michael, “you won’t make Merchant if you keep acting the fool.”

  “Misha, why did you do it?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I mean why. Why didn’t you stay on Earth, at home?”

  Michael waited a moment before answering. “It wasn’t a hard decision, Lev. You left years ago and things got worse, not better. When I left we had finally exhausted metals in the asteroid belt and still the Sommen trapped our ships within the solar system. The Americans sent an entire fleet against them—to try and get beyond, out into the galaxy.”

  “And?”

  “No survivors.”

  Lev chuckled at the thought of dead Americans, trying to figure out why it should seem so funny un
til he gave up; it wasn’t funny; he had become perverse. The temperature indicator crept downward and he imagined the planet’s always-there clouds thickening, pregnant with a snow that would come whether anyone wanted it or not. It began as a sprinkle—as if someone flew overhead scattering salt to patter against his helmet. Within minutes a new layer coated the road and surrounding hills, muffling everything, and Lev suspected that should he remove his helmet it would be difficult to hear anything beyond a few meters away, anything less than a scream. The snow would be dry. Squeaky and slick. Once his exhaust melted the ammonia-water mix he could slide down a gentle slope to get lost in a mile-deep drift or sail off a bottomless cliff and maybe both were a fine way to go—better than a slow death on Earth . . .

  “Misha,” said Lev, “they hadn’t invaded by the time you left Earth? The Sommen still hadn’t taken her?”

  “No. Just quarantined the entire system.”

  Lev was about to ask another question when he doubled over coughing, one blending into the others in a continuous roar until blackness took everything, forcing the suit lights to fade. He wasn’t gone for long. The chronometer indicated that barely a minute had passed by the time he came around, watching as the mules danced in the snow around him, their engines whining and blowing cones of exhaust into the air to crystallize and drift downward in sparkling veils, making him grin. Warsaw. The frost reminded him of the city’s winter just before he left, when Marina had dragged him from the club and into the snow on one of those mornings so cold it made his nose hurt, made his fingers numb in seconds except for where they touched her. She had smiled at him, called him crazy. For wanting to leave Earth he was eccentric, but for wanting to leave her he was a true nut case, someone to be pitied except that neither of them felt sad about the parting because they had both been in it for the sex anyway, too self-absorbed for anything approaching love and so . . . she gave him one last kiss and headed into town, calling over her shoulder a kind of good-bye: “Don’t forget what my ass looks like, Lev.”

  The mules were as old now as Marina had been then. Twenty. And Lev cared for them in spite of everything because his life depended on the things, because facing the laughter from the named Merchants who never bothered to hide contempt for humans was easy; it was their curiosity that was difficult. The first Sommen warrior who had seen the mules approached Lev with amusement and it had been early in the game so that Lev hadn’t yet learned the protocol: When speaking with a warrior you never looked it in the eye. He lost three teeth and part of his tongue when the Sommen had kicked in the side of his face, dragging one claw through his right cheek and then out the left. A lesson—to mind one’s manners.

  Yet even the Sommen got the point of mules, knew what Lev was thinking, because after the blow the warrior had tossed Lev a suit-sealer. “Robots so primitive they have almost no signatures. Nothing. You will live a long time, a breather of oxygen and poison and a true coward whom death cannot find.”

  But that was almost as old as his memories of Marina. Today the alien steppes stretched out to the horizon and blended into the sky, white and gray so that he had a moment of difficulty in telling up from down and had to sit again, the coughing threatening to resume.

  Michael helped him to his feet. “It’s good this is your last trip, Lev. The ammonia. It’s taking to your lungs, eroding your tissues.”

  “And someday, Misha, all this will be yours.”

  Michael’s voice sounded raspy over his headset, and Lev wondered if the ammonia had already started its work on him. “Mules. Everyone else uses grav carts and high-speed auto-tractors, but old Lev Sandakchiev? He uses ancient robotic mules that need oxygen tanks to even function.”

  “And grav carts leave an electromagnetic trail that can be spotted for thousands of kilometers, from space. I’ve seen entire resupplies wiped out before the Merchants ever heard a sound or knew what was coming.”

  “It’s all about planning, old man,” said Michael. “You plan your runs to go between satellite passes, shut down at the tiniest sign of remote detection or scanning. Planning, Lev, and by now you’d have moved more than enough cargo to afford a thousand mules.”

  Lev pushed past him toward the general direction of the front lines, not bothering to check the guidance system, trusting instinct to get them through the snow. Angry.

  “I have a thousand mules, Misha. And while other humans died for the sake of speed, I live. Slow and steady, like the tortoise, so I don’t have to shut down for overhead surveillance and don’t have to worry about dark angels above because nobody ever thinks to look for old Earth technologies. You are of Earth, Misha. Have some pride.”

  A sea of headless mules kept pace with them, bouncing up and down through the snow on four legs, cutting a path for the two men as they followed. Lev enjoyed controlling the things with his keypad, watching them turn in unison when he commanded it—like having control over a flock of grounded sparrows. Each one carried five hundred kilos of cargo. He grinned with joy when fifty of them slammed into a massive ammonia drift, sending a spray of snow into the air as if the planet itself had just vomited ice.

  “My mules are magnificent!” Lev shouted, almost missing the alarm indicator on his display.

  “Lev?” Michael asked, his voice a whisper. “A nano-mine just activated.”

  “I see it. You know the procedure, Misha. Run. It’s your only chance.” Lev refused to look at him now, fought the urge to scream and keep on screaming, the twin sensations of futility and despair so familiar that he almost failed to recognize them. Michael was young—too young to deserve this, and it wasn’t fair and he hated the Sommen for it, for forcing the boy to leave Earth because staying home had become just as dangerous as serving them on resupply. Just as dangerous as war.

  “Lev, they’ve locked on, help me!”

  “I can’t help you, Misha,” Lev explained. The tears flowed freely now, his knowing that he had no help for Michael—that nobody could have helped—making it worse. “Once nanos zero on a signature, there’s nothing I can do but go on; supplies have priority, Misha, I’m sorry. We’ll both die if I stay. You must have had a suit defect that went unnoticed during inspection, something that caused a characteristic emission, one that triggered an old minefield geared toward organic life. That must be it. We just wandered into an old nano-minefield, one that’s not even charted. I’m so sorry.”

  Lev closed his eyes. He imagined. It didn’t take much to imagine anything so horrible, not since he had seen it all happen before, and especially not since Michael screamed until the last second before being consumed.

  Better to forget, Lev reminded himself. Better to pretend that boys such as Misha never existed and instead focus on the beauty of the mules as they bounded through the drifts, their engines whining and screaming with perfect effort, oblivious to the threat of nanos because no nanos would have been calibrated to target anything so simple and so harmless. So terrestrial.

  And the front was close now. Vibrations shook the ground under his feet.

  Lev had just finished offloading cargo into the nearest storage unit when he felt his gut twist in fear, plasma artillery ripping open the air to send him flying against the entrance to a bunker. He slid down the stairs. But before he could collect himself—hand in his invoice and confirm the final shipment—the door opened and one of them snatched Lev by the helmet, lifting him off the ground and several feet into the air where his feet kicked like a child’s. The thing tossed him inside and shut the door.

  An isba. The term was old, so old that Lev shouldn’t have even remembered it but he did, recalling the time he had gone skiing near Almaty during a cold spell that kept them from setting foot outside the cabin: an isba, half earth and half log with a blaze that allowed his friends to lounge in underwear, made them all sweat while the wind howled outside at forty below. The bunker reminded him of that time, but in nightmare. More than thirty Sommen had arranged themselves in a circle and were half naked, their skin covered with scars a
nd mottled with the signs of deep plasma burns, so horrific that Lev forgot himself and stared until he appreciated his mistake and flinched to close his eyes. He waited for the blow.

  “You are the Apprentice, the human on its final run,” one said, Lev’s suit translating its voice into a sterile Ukrainian, coaxing his eyes open again. “I uploaded coordinates into your computer, so that you can navigate alone to one last supply point, your mission incomplete until then. None of your robots will accompany you. In an hour we attack and you will prepare the way by supplying our forward post, after which you are to report here. To complete your service and receive your name.”

  The Sommen handed Lev a packet, which, as soon as he took it, felt so heavy that he thought it would pull him to the floor. He pushed it into a pouch and bowed. “I will deliver it immediately, as you wish.”

  Once he had shut the door behind him, he breathed again and then gasped. The plasma shells, when they burst, sublimed ammonia ice into incandescent gas that floated through the air so Lev imagined he was crawling through some kind of fairyland, where the ammonia wasn’t ammonia, it was cotton candy in pale green, weightless. Misha would have liked this, he thought. But the memory of Michael scuttled in to make Lev scream, and he buried his helmet in the snow and pounded the ground until his friend’s face disappeared and even then Lev stayed motionless, wanted to ensure his thoughts traversed a path just as safe as his body so he lay there as the detonations vibrated everything, including his teeth; Lev studied the map display, staring at the blinking light. His legs shook. They refused at first to propel him forward, as if the nerves had suddenly split and gone dead but then he noticed the ground shift below him, the snow parting in front of his faceplate as he slid closer to the front.