David Weber - By Schism Rent Asunder

TOR

Atom Doherty Associates Book

New York

This is a work of fiction. All of the characters, organizations, and events portrayed in this novel are either products of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously.

BY SCHISM RENT ASUNDER

Copyright 2008 by David Weber

All rights reserved.

Edited by Patrick Nielsen Hayden

Maps by Ellisa Mitchell and Jennifer Hanover

A Tor Book

Published by Tom Doherty Associates, LLC

175 Fifth Avenue

New York, NY 10010

www.tor-forge.com

Tor is a registered trademark of Tom Doherty Associates, LLC.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Weber, David, 1952-

By schism rent asunder / David Weber.1st ed.

p. cm. "A Tom Doherty Associates book."

ISBN-13: 978-0-7653-1501-4

ISBN-10: 0-7653-1501-7 I. Title

PS3573.E217 B9 2008 813'.54dc22

2008016957

First Edition: July 2008

Printed in the United States of America

0987654321

By Schism

Rent
Asunder

Safehold

Book II

David Weber

Synopsis

The world has changed. The mercantile kingdom of Charis has prevailed over the alliance designed to exterminate it. Armed with better sailing vessels, better guns and better devices of all sorts, Charis faced the combined navies of the rest of the world at Darcos Sound and Armageddon Reef, and broke them. Despite the implacable hostility of the Church of God Awaiting, Charis still stands, still free, still tolerant, still an island of innovation in a world in which the Church has worked for centuries to keep humanity locked at a medieval level of existence.

But the powerful men who run the Church aren't going to take their defeat lying down. Charis may control the world's seas, but it barely has an army worthy of the name. And as King Cayleb knows, far too much of the kingdom's recent good fortune is due to the secret manipulations of the being that calls himself Merlina being that, the world must not find out too soon, is more than human. A being on whose shoulders rests the last chance for humanity's freedom.

Now, as Charis and its archbishop make the rift with Mother Church explicit, the storm gathers. Schism has come to the world of Safehold. Nothing will ever be the same.

Tor Books by David Weber

Off Armageddon Reef

By Schism Rent Asunder

Contents

It was very quiet in the inverted recon skimmer.

It tended to be that way in orbit, aside from the quiet chirping of an occasional audio signal from the skimmer's flight computers, and those only seemed to perfect the silence, rather than interrupt it. The man who had once been Nimue Alban leaned back in the pilot's couch, looking down through the clear armorplast of his canopy at the planet beneath him, and treasured that quiet, serene calm.

I really shouldn't be here, he thought, watching the gorgeous blue-and-white-swirled marble of the planet called Safehold while his skimmer swept steadily towards the dark line of the terminator. I've got way too many things to be doing back in Tellesberg. And I've got no business at all hanging around up here, stealth systems or no.

All of that was true, and it didn't matter. Or, rather, it didn't matter enough to keep him from being here, anyway.

In one sense, there was absolutely no need for him to be up here physically. The Self-Navigating Autonomous Reconnaissance and Communication platforms he'd deployed were capable of transmitting exactly the same imagery to him, without any need for him to see it with his own eyes... if, indeed, that could be said to be what he was doing. And the SNARCs were far smaller, and even stealthier, than his recon skimmer. If the kinetic bombardment system that lunatic Langhorne had hung in orbit around Safehold really did have first-line passive sensors, it was far less likely to detect a SNARC than the skimmer, and he knew it.

Yet there were times when he needed this silent, still moment, this vacuum-clear eyrie from which he could look down upon the last planet mankind could claim. He needed the reminder of whowhathe truly was, and of what he must somehow restore to the human beings thronging that planet so far below him. And he needed to see its beauty, to... cleanse his thoughts, recoup his determination. He spent so much time poring over the take from his network of SNARCs, studying the spy reports, listening in on the plans and conspiracies of the enemies of the kingdom he had made his home that it sometimes seemed that that was all there was to the universe. That the sheer -weight of opposition towering up all about him was too vast, too deep, for any single creature to oppose.

The people around him, the people he'd come to care for, were the true antidote to the despair which sometimes threatened him as he contemplated the enormous scope of the task to which he had been summoned. They were the ones who reminded him why humanity was worth fighting for, reminded him of the heights to which mankind could aspire, of the courage and the sacrificethe trustof which Homo sapiens was capable. Despite the way their history and their religion had been cynically manipulated, they were as strong and vital, as courageous, as any humans in the history of the race which had once been his own.

Yet, even so, there were times when that wasn't quite enough. When his awareness of the odds against their survival, his sense of desperate responsibility, and the sheer loneliness of living among them but never truly being one of them pressed down upon him. When the burden of his potential immortality against the ephemeral span of the lives to which they were condemned filled him with an aching grief for losses yet to come. When his responsibility for the wave of religious strife even now beginning to sweep around that blue and white sphere crushed down upon him. And when the question of whoand whathe truly was filled him with a loneliness that sucked at his soul like the vacuum outside his skimmer.

It was against those times that he needed this moment, gazing down upon the world which had become his charge, his responsibility. Needed to once more look upon the reality, the fledgling future, which made all the present's harsh demands worthwhile.

It really is a pretty world, he thought almost dreamily. And looking at it from up here puts it all into perspective, doesn't it? Beautiful as it is, important as the human race may be to me, it's only one world among billions, only one species among hundreds of millions, at the least. If God can put that much effort into His universe, then I can damned well do whatever He demands of me, can't I? Andhis lips quirked in a wry smileat least I can be pretty sure He understands. If He can put all of this together, put me right smack in the middle of it, then I've just got to assume He knows what He's doing. Which means all I really have to do is figure out what I'm supposed to be doing.

He snorted in amusement, the sound loud in the cockpit's silence, then shook himself and let the flight couch come upright once again.

Enough planet-gazing, Merlin, he told himself firmly. It's going to be dawn in Tellesberg in three more hours, and Franz is going to be wondering where his relief is. Time to get your molycirc butt home, where it belongs.

"Owl," he said aloud.

"Yes, Lieutenant Commander?" the distant AI in the cavern under Safe-hold's tallest mountain replied almost instantly over the secure communications link.

"I'm headed home. Run a hundred-klick sweep around the alpha base and make sure there's no one hanging around to notice the skimmer on its

way to the garage. And take a look at my balcony, too. Make sure no one's in a position to see me when you drop me off."