- Home
- David Weber
The Valkyrie Protocol
The Valkyrie Protocol Read online
Table of Contents
chapter one
chapter two
chapter three
chapter four
chapter five
chapter six
chapter seven
chapter eight
chapter nine
chapter ten
chapter eleven
chapter twelve
chapter thirteen
chapter fourteen
chapter fifteen
chapter sixteen
chapter seventeen
chapter eighteen
chapter nineteen
chapter twenty
chapter twenty-one
chapter twenty-two
chapter twenty-three
chapter twenty-four
chapter twenty-five
chapter twenty-six
chapter twenty-seven
chapter twenty-eight
chapter twenty-nine
chapter thirty
chapter thirty-one
chapter thirty-two
chapter thirty-three
chapter thirty-four
chapter thirty-five
chapter thirty-six
chapter thirty-seven
chapter thirty-eight
chapter thirty-nine
chapter forty
chapter forty-one
chapter forty-two
chapter forty-three
chapter forty-four
chapter forty-five
chapter forty-six
epilogue
The
Valkyrie
Protocol
–––
DAVID WEBER &
JACOB HOLO
Baen
The Valkyrie Protocol
David Weber and Jacob Holo
UNTANGLE THE PAST TO SAVE THE FUTURE. A NEW NOVEL IN THE WORLD OF THE BEST-SELLING THE GORDIAN PROTOCOL
TIME IS RUNNING OUT
Agent Raibert Kaminski and the crew of the Transtemporal Vehicle Kleio have stumbled across a temporal implosion that has claimed two whole universes, and neither Raibert nor his crew can ¬ figure out what caused this calamity, or how to stop its spread. Meanwhile, old colleagues of Raibert’s from the Antiquities Rescue Trust, together with a version of Samuel Pepys transplanted from the 17th century into the 30th, have proposed an expedition into the past. The goal? To branch the timeline by preventing the Plague of Justinian, one of the worst pandemics in human history. And on a multidimensional level, governmental entity SysGov’s multiverse neighbor, the xenophobic Admin, is stirring. While their ambassadors put on a friendly show, the Admin is amassing a fleet of advanced, heavily armed time machines—with SysGov firmly in the crosshairs.
In the midst of the temporal turmoil, time is running out for Raibert and his team to save the rest of the known universes from ceasing to exist. Navigating the paradoxes of time can be a killer task—especially when dogged by those who seek your destruction at every turn. But this isn’t the ¬ first Time Rodeo for the crew of the Kleio, and they won’t go down without a ¬ fight—no matter where—or when—the threat to the multiverse arises!
IN THIS SERIES by DAVID WEBER and JACOB HOLO
The Gordian Protocol
The Valkyrie Protocol
BAEN BOOKS by DAVID WEBER
HONOR HARRINGTON
On Basilisk Station
The Honor of the Queen
The Short Victorious War
Field of Dishonor
Flag in Exile
Honor Among Enemies
In Enemy Hands
Echoes of Honor
Ashes of Victory
War of Honor
Crown of Slaves (with Eric Flint)
The Shadow of Saganami
At All Costs
Storm from the Shadows
Torch of Freedom (with Eric Flint)
Mission of Honor
A Rising Thunder
Shadow of Freedom
Cauldron of Ghosts (with Eric Flint)
Shadow of Victory
Uncompromising Honor
EDITED BY DAVID WEBER
More than Honor
Worlds of Honor
Changer of Worlds
The Service of the Sword
In Fire Forged
Beginnings
MANTICORE ASCENDANT
A Call to Duty (with Timothy Zahn)
A Call to Arms (with Timothy Zahn & Tom Pope)
A Call to Vengeance (with Timothy Zahn & Tom Pope)
THE STAR KINGDOM
A Beautiful Friendship
Fire Season (with Jane Lindskold)
Treecat Wars (with Jane Lindskold)
House of Steel: The Honorverse Companion (with BuNine)
The Sword of the South
Empire from the Ashes
Mutineers’ Moon
The Armageddon Inheritance
Heirs of Empire
Path of the Fury
In Fury Born
The Apocalypse Troll
The Excalibur Alternative
Oath of Swords
The War God’s Own
Wind Rider’s Oath
War Maid’s Choice
Hell’s Gate (with Linda Evans)
Hell Hath No Fury (with Linda Evans)
The Road to Hell (with Joelle Presby)
WITH STEVE WHITE
Insurrection
Crusade
In Death Ground
The Shiva Option
WITH JOHN RINGO
March Upcountry
March to the Sea
March to the Stars
We Few
WITH ERIC FLINT
1633
1634: The Baltic War
The Valkyrie Protocol
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 © 2020 by Words of Weber, Inc. & Jacob Holo.
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: 978-1-9821-2490-8
EISBN: 978-1-62579-794-0
Cover art by Dave Seeley
First printing, October 2020
Distributed by Simon & Schuster
1230 Avenue of the Americas
New York, NY 10020
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Weber, David, 1952- author. | Holo, Jacob, author.
Title: The valkyrie protocol / David Weber & Jacob Holo.
Description: Riverdale, NY : Baen, [2020] | Series: Gordian division
Identifiers: LCCN 2020029383 | ISBN 9781982124908 (hardcover)
Subjects: GSAFD: Science fiction.
Classification: LCC PS3573.E217 V35 2020 | DDC 813/.54—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020029383
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
For Sharon and Heather
chapter one
–––
Schloss von Schröder
SysGov, 2980 CE
It was a small chapel.
It was also warm, despite the snow the ice-fanged wind drove against the ancient rose window above its altar. It had been lovingly maintained for over fifteen hundred years, and it had been provided with proper heating and air-conditioning six centuries before this cold and snowy night. Despite th
at, the sense of its age filled the participants’ nostrils with a subliminal scent of dust, of leather bindings and printer’s ink. Not because there was any dust, but because there ought to have been. Because that many endless years were a palpable presence, peopled by all the other human beings who had passed through this chapel.
A lot of those people had been named Schröder.
The schloss’s current owner was not named Schröder, but the title of Gräfin von Schröder had passed to her through a matrilineal cadet line when the last Schröder to hold it died without issue in 2653. The direct Schröder line had ceased to exist, but the current gräfin had been only too willing to offer the chapel’s use tonight.
Klaus-Wilhelm von Schröder stood just outside the sanctuary’s rail.
He looked a bit odd in the chapel’s setting, and not simply because it had been built so many centuries before. He was clad in the formal “white tie” of a thousand years in the past, which was enormously anachronistic in itself, but it seemed even more so in his case because no one in the thirtieth century had ever seen him in it. His normal—invariable, actually—attire was a perfectly tailored uniform in what had once been called feldgrau, with the golden eye and bared-sword shoulder patch of SysPol’s Gordian Division and a vice-commissioner’s insignia.
Seeing him in anything else was a bit like catching God in his bathrobe, Benjamin Schröder thought. On the other hand, he admitted, that . . . patriarchal simile might have occurred to him because Klaus-Wilhelm von Schröder also happened to be his grandfather.
And the other reason it’s occurring to you is because you’re both a hell of a long way from home and you’re just a teeny tiny bit nervous, he thought. Which is stupid, under the circumstances.
Thanks to his neural implants, Benjamin could check the time—again—without anyone else’s knowledge. That meant he could at least avoid looking like the proverbial nervous groom.
You and Elzbietá have been living together for months, and nobody in the entire universe—hell, in the entire multiverse—gives a damn, he reminded himself. In fact, the only people this wedding really matters to are the two of you. Well, and to Granddad, too, I suppose. He has dropped that “living in sin” thing on you more than once. Surprising how straitlaced he can be sometimes, even after all this time. But it’s not like he drew a gun on you to get here! And worrying about it now that you are here is—well, it’s a perfect illustration of why no one who really knows you ever said you weren’t capable of being stupid. It’s not like being dissolved into goo by weaponized nanotech, after all!
He knew it wasn’t, because he’d tried that, too. Being dissolved into goo. Or at least one iteration of him had, and that other iteration’s entire memory—including the highly unpleasant one of how he had died—lived in the same brain, side by side with the remembered lifetime of the version of him that hadn’t been dissolved.
It was . . . complicated.
He snorted softly at the thought, and the tall, broad-shouldered, blond-haired man at his shoulder glanced at him with a raised eyebrow.
“Nothing, Raibert,” Benjamin reassured him. “Just a thought.”
“So you are capable of rational thought at the moment, Doc?” Raibert Kaminski, who did wear Gordian Division’s uniform, grinned. “Thank God! After dragging your butt here this morning, I’d started to wonder.”
“I’m not that bad.”
“On the contrary,” Klaus-Wilhelm said. “You’re worse than that, Benjamin.”
“I am not!”
“Ah? Then you remembered the ring?”
“That’s Raibert’s job. He’s the best man around here. Well, best synthoid, anyway.”
“That is so twentieth-century bio-based prejudice,” Raibert observed. “Just because you and Elzbietá refuse to give up your meat suits is no reason for you to be casting aspersions upon my own superbly engineered self.”
Benjamin made a rude sound, and his grandfather chuckled. Neither of them had ever met Raibert before his biological mind had been electronically stripped and his biological body had been rendered down for fertilizer, or whatever else the System Cooperative Administration’s reclamation systems had done with it. His current body had been hijacked from the Admin’s Department of Incarceration in Klaus-Wilhelm’s original universe after Csaba Shigeki, Director-General of the Department of Temporal Investigation, had decreed Raibert’s biological destruction. And after his connectome’s removal, the electronic recording of his personality and memories had been sentenced to life imprisonment in a virtual prison.
To be fair to Shigeki, which none of the men in that chapel were prepared to be unless they had to, he had been fighting to prevent Raibert from destroying his entire universe. A reasonable person might concede that had given him at least some justification. And he’d actually shown leniency, in many ways. The Admin’s laws about AIs and nanotech were draconian. Its entire government had come into existence in reaction to a grisly “accident” in which a rogue AI had left literally billions dead, and its law code was designed to prevent anything like that from ever happening again. In pursuit of that object, it was ruthless with violators, and Raibert, from an entirely different universe, had been in violation of dozens of its laws. That meant he could have been sentenced to a one-way domain—a virtual prison where prisoners became effectively immortal but there were no wardens, no guards. Nothing to protect the inmates from the most horrific atrocities their fellow inmates could visit upon them. It was, in fact, a place which was—literally—worse than death. Not that a prisoner couldn’t “die” there. They could, over and over and over again.
Of course, Raibert wasn’t exactly prepared to give Shigeki the benefit of any doubts. Nor had he known that the director was being merciful—by his own lights, at least. All he’d known was that both his and the Admin’s universe were going to die if someone didn’t fix it and that Shigeki was determined that no one would. And, of course, that he’d been subjected to the ultimate violation when his connectome was forcibly stripped in a process that automatically destroyed his biological mind forever. Nor had he known that there were worse prisons to which he might have been sent. The one he’d been in was quite bad enough, as far as he was concerned, and he’d expected to stay in it for the rest of his life . . . until his integrated companion, Philosophus, had rampaged through the Admin’s infostructure to break him out. In the process, Philo—who, unlike Raibert, had been “born” as an electronic being—had uploaded him to one of the Admin Peacekeepers’ synthoids. As a consequence, Raibert came equipped with quite a few military-style upgrades, and he’d decided to keep his present body once he’d managed to fight his way home to his own universe once more.
Of course, he’d added a few additional upgrades to it, too. For one thing, the ridiculous firewalls the Admin—better known as “the fucking Admin” if Raibert was talking—insisted upon as part of its paranoia about artificial intelligences in general had been deleted when his software was updated to link with the Consolidated System Government’s infonets. In the process, Raibert and Philo had made damned sure no Admin backdoors had been left behind.
“Look, I know you two are enjoying the chance to give me a hard time,” Benjamin said now, “but, really. Where the hell is Elzbietá?”
“If the two of you had been willing to settle for a virtual wedding, like any sane, civilized beings, that wouldn’t be an issue,” Raibert pointed out. “But, no! Not you two! Had to be ‘in the flesh,’ didn’t it? You could’ve been married in Notre Dame, or St. Peter’s Basilica. Hell, you could have been married in the Hagia Sophia—the original Hagia Sophia—if you hadn’t insisted on this brick-and-mortar anachronism!”
“And if we were both connectomes we would’ve done just that,” Benjamin shot back. “But in case you noticed, we aren’t.”
“Yeah, yeah, yeah.” Raibert grimaced, but he let it drop, as well. Probably, Benjamin thought, because he knew as well as Benjamin did that the real reason Benjamin and Elzbietá had chosen
this venue was to honor Klaus-Wilhelm. God only knew how many Schröders had been married in this chapel over the endless, dusty years, but Klaus-Wilhelm was among them. He and his first wife had been married on this very stone floor.
Well, Benjamin reminded himself, not on this stone floor, actually.
The chapel in which Klaus-Wilhelm had been married no longer existed. For that matter, his entire universe no longer existed. He and Elzbietá Abramowski were, in fact, survivors of that dead universe, and Benjamin—or the version of him that had died there—had helped to murder it.
There’d been no choice. That iteration of the Admin’s universe should never have existed. It had been created out of the chaos of the “Gordian Knot” which had twisted sixteen universes together into a lethal cluster—a seething mass of temporal energy which would have destroyed them all, if it had not been undone. And so they had unknotted them, and the price had been Klaus-Wilhelm and Elzbietá’s own universe.
And the life of the Benjamin Schröder who had been born of it.
Fifteen out of the sixteen universes entangled in the Knot survived because of that terrible sacrifice. A ninety-four percent survival rate was pretty damned good, Benjamin told himself again. He told himself that a lot, when the ghosts of that vanished universe invaded his dreams. And it was true. He knew it was true, but somehow that didn’t help on the bad nights.