The Macedonian Hazard Read online

  Contents

  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

  EPILOGUE

  CAST OF CHARACTERS

  THE

  MACEDONIAN

  HAZARD

  Eric Flint

  Gorg Huff

  Paula Goodlett

  The Macedonian Hazard

  Eric Flint and Paula Goodlett

  TIME TRAVEL ALTERNATE HISTORY FROM A MASTER. A new tale of time-displaced persons fighting for their lives in the ancient world, from 1632 and Boundary series creator Eric Flint.

  It’s been more than a year since the cruise ship Queen of the Sea was transported in time and space to the ancient Mediterranean not long after the death of Alexander the Great.

  Captain Lars Floden and the other “Ship People” are trying to plant the seeds of modern civilization. It’s not an easy task, to put it mildly, even if they have a tacit alliance with the co-regents of Alexander’s empire, his widow Roxane, and Eurydice, the wife of his half-brother.

  For they have plenty of enemies, too. Cassander is using every foul means available to turn Macedonia and Greece into his own empire. The brutal general Antigonus One-Eye is doing the same in Mesopotamia. And Ptolemy, the cleverest of them all, is expanding his Egyptian realm to the Red Sea.

  Things aren’t any easier in the colony that passengers from the cruise ship founded on the Caribbean island of Trinidad. President Allen Wiley is trying to build a twenty-first century democratic nation, but the people he has to work with aren’t the most suitable for the task: oldsters from the future, local tribesmen, and third-century BCE immigrants from Europe and Africa.

  War, religious strife, assassinations, espionage, poisonings and other murders—and a fair amount of love, too—all mix together with the Ship People's knowledge from the 21st century to form a new weaving of the fates. Hopefully, that will lead to a bright new future. If it doesn't kill everyone first.

  THE RING OF FIRE SERIES

  1632 by Eric Flint

  1633 by Eric Flint & David Weber

  1634: The Baltic War by Eric Flint & David Weber

  1634: The Galileo Affair by Eric Flint & Andrew Dennis

  1634: The Bavarian Crisis by Eric Flint & Virginia DeMarce

  1634: The Ram Rebellion by Eric Flint & Virginia DeMarce et al.

  1635: The Cannon Law by Eric Flint & Andrew Dennis

  1635: The Dreeson Incident by Eric Flint & Virginia DeMarce

  1635: The Eastern Front by Eric Flint

  1635: The Papal Stakes by Eric Flint & Charles E. Gannon

  1636: The Saxon Uprising by Eric Flint

  1636: The Kremlin Games by Eric Flint, Gorg Huff & Paula Goodlett

  1636: The Devil’s Opera by Eric Flint & David Carrico

  1636: Commander Cantrell in the West Indies by Eric Flint & Charles E. Gannon

  1636: The Viennese Waltz by Eric Flint, Gorg Huff & Paula Goodlett

  1636: The Cardinal Virtues by Eric Flint & Walter Hunt

  1635: A Parcel of Rogues by Eric Flint & Andrew Dennis

  1636: The Ottoman Onslaught by Eric Flint

  1636: Mission to the Mughals by Eric Flint & Griffin Barber

  1636: The Vatican Sanction by Eric Flint & Charles E. Gannon

  1637: The Volga Rules by Eric Flint, Gorg Huff & Paula Goodlett

  1637: The Polish Maelstrom by Eric Flint

  1636: The China Venture by Eric Flint & Iver P. Cooper

  1636: The Atlantic Encounter by Eric Flint & Walter H. Hunt

  1637: No Peace Beyond the Line by Eric Flint & Charles E. Gannon

  1635: The Tangled Web by Virginia DeMarce

  1635: The Wars for the Rhine by Anette Pedersen

  1636: Seas of Fortune by Iver P. Cooper

  1636: The Chronicles of Dr. Gribbleflotz by Kerryn Offord & Rick Boatright

  1636: Flight of the Nightingale by David Carrico

  Time Spike by Eric Flint & Marilyn Kosmatka

  The Alexander Inheritance by Eric Flint, Gorg Huff & Paula Goodlett

  Grantville Gazette volumes I-V, ed. by Eric Flint

  Grantville Gazette VI-VII, ed. by Eric Flint & Paula Goodlett

  Grantville Gazette VIII, ed. by Eric Flint & Walt Boyes

  Ring of Fire I-IV, ed. by Eric Flint

  The Macedonian Hazard

  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 © 2021 by Eric Flint, Paula Goodlett, and Gorg Huff

  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: 978-1-9821-2510-3

  eISBN: 978-1-62579-792-6

  Cover art by Tom Kidd

  Maps by Michael Knopp

  First printing, January 2021

  Distributed by Simon & Schuster

  1230 Avenue of the Americas

  New York, NY 10020

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Names: Flint, Eric, author. | Huff, Gorg, author. | Goodlett, Paula, author.

  Title: The Macedonian hazard / Eric Flint, Gorg Huff, and Paula Goodlett.

  Description: Riverdale, NY : Baen, 2021. | Series: Ring of Fire

  Identifiers: LCCN 2020044429 | ISBN 9781982125103 (hardcover)

  Subjects: GSAFD: Alternative histories (Fiction). | Science fiction.

  Classification: LCC PS3556.L548 M33 2021 | DDC 813/.54—dc23

  LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020044429

  Pages by Joy Freeman (www.pagesbyjoy.com)

  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

  To my daughter, BJ Matthews,

  because I love you beyond all reason.

  —Paula Goodlett

  To my father, Harold D. Huff,

  inventor, writer, and generalist,

  who taught me that a rear axle is a lathe

  and a tool is whatever you use to do a job.

  —Gorg Huff

  To my mother, Mary Flint,

  who was an Alexander the Great fangirl.

  —Eric Flint

  PROLOGUE

  Build, Sell, or Die

  Queen of the Sea, off the coast of Trinidad

  November 28, 321 BCE

  Stella Matthews lay on the bed in her cabin on the Queen of the Sea and watched TV. Stella was fifty-two years old, a bit overweight, recently divorced, with two adult children left behind by The Event, and was on the Queen of the Sea to, as the movie said, “get her groove back.”

  Being dropped into the fourth century Before the Common Era was not helping Stella get her groove back. The fact that she was going to be dumped off the Queen of the Sea with nothing but her l
uggage and some so-called “money” that was sucked out of Eleanor Kinney’s thumb wasn’t doing anything for her groove either.

  So she wasn’t goofing off watching TV. She was studying. There were recorded programs that could be watched on demand. The one she was watching was a discussion including Allen Wiley, who was the President of New America, his assistant Amanda Miller, Eleanor Kinney, and a few others.

  “As you all must know by now,” Kinney was saying, “there is no way that the Queen of the Sea can support the passengers indefinitely. That, as much as the oil, is why we’re here.”

  Allen Wiley nodded his politician’s head with his face a picture of grave concern. “We will need to build ourselves a new nation here in the past. Grow our own food—”

  “There is no way that the colony on Trinidad will be able to grow its own food this year and probably not next year either,” Kinney interrupted. “With all the hard work and goodwill in the world, it takes time for plants to grow. The colony—”

  “New America,” Wiley interrupted in turn.

  “New America,” Kinney agreed with a nod at Wiley, then looked back at the camera. “New America is going to have to buy all, or almost all, its food for at least the next year. Probably the next three to five years. Some of that will come from oil, but not all. There are only two ways that New America can support itself: manufacturing and trade. This is different from previous colonies because this is the largest initial colony that we have been able to find, not that we’ve looked that hard.” She smiled at the camera. “But the Mayflower carried one hundred and two passengers and about thirty crew to the New World. We will be more than two thousand…”

  They kept talking, but Stella, a legal secretary, didn’t have a clue what she might build or sell. There probably weren’t going to be a lot of lawsuits for her to type up and file.

  They went on talking about who owned the oil well and, for that matter, the oil field. The oil field was owned by the colony, and the oil rig was owned by the investors, which included the Queen of the Sea, some of the crew from the Reliance, the colony, and the roughnecks working on it. There would be a dividend, but Stella could do math. Especially financial math. It was unlikely that she was going to be able to live off the annual dividend. I’m going to need a job.

  Fort Plymouth, Trinidad

  December 8, 321 BCE

  Stella looked at the lot marked by sticks in the grass-covered sandy soil and silently raged. She knew perfectly well that her rage was fueled by terror, but there was a lot of terror to fuel it. Her hunt for a job wasn’t going well. It wasn’t that there wasn’t work for secretaries. It was that there were a lot of secretaries on the Queen of the Sea when The Event happened. And several of them had better ins with the new government than Stella did. All Stella had was her buyout from her room on the Queen of the Sea.

  The money she got as the buyout of her share of the Queen of the Sea, along with a mortgage, was paying for this piece of land and the “townhouse” to be built on it here in Fort Plymouth. The deal was that fifty percent of the combined cost of the land and construction was covered by the buyout, and the rest was a loan at three percent annual interest. The total cost was forty thousand New America dollars, and she would pay out the other half over ten years, along with paying for her food and drink at the community center. She would be eating at the community center because her house wasn’t going to have a kitchen for the foreseeable future. Very few of the houses in Fort Plymouth were going to have kitchens. Having a kitchen of your own upped the cost of a townhouse by over ten grand. She had no idea how she was going to get the money to make the payments on the basic townhouse. For the moment she had five grand in the bank from the sale of her cell phone to the ship, and that was going to go away in about ten months’ worth of payments.

  That was what the stakes were for, marking out her part of the block of townhouses that were to be built together. It wasn’t much of a townhouse. Seven hundred and fifty square feet, one bedroom, one workroom, a closet that was supposed to be a bathroom once they got running water, no kitchen.

  They claimed that it would have electricity and plumbing as soon as they could manage it. For now, it was to be built with a place for the wires and pipes.

  She looked over to her left to see an old white guy with a walker. He was looking at the lot next to hers. After a moment, she recognized him. He had been in the cabin next to hers on the Queen of the Sea. Two internal cabins with no windows translated into two apartments in Fort Plymouth.

  “You weren’t using a walker on the Queen.”

  He looked at her and started to bristle, which Stella welcomed. She could really use a yelling match right now. Someone, anyone, to have a fight with would help.

  But then the cowardly bastard deflated. Just looking sad and old. “The Queen had elevators and carpeted halls. Besides, I didn’t have to go very far at any given time. There was always some place to sit.”

  Stella nodded and introduced herself.

  He was Donald “call me Don” Carnegie. Seventy-seven years old and a retired plumber who smoked for fifty years and was about to take it up again because, with his diabetes, he was going to die soon anyway.

  The natives used tobacco in pipes, had for who knew how long. Don figured why the hell not. At least he’d die happy.

  Work area, Fort Plymouth, Trinidad

  December 15, 321 BCE

  The half tent—roof, no walls—was part of the gear from the Queen. Now it was filled with benches as Stella joined the work crew. A man waved her over and directed her to a chair. The crude bench table in front of her had a rough wooden framework for slats with strips of thin wood crisscrossed between them. And a bucket of gray-brown-looking goop. There was also a flat piece of wood with a handle sticking into the goop in the bucket.

  Once everyone was seated, the man held up one of the frameworks and said, “This is wattle. It’s just a thin framework of just about anything and its only purpose is to provide a place to put the daub.” He set down the wattle framework and picked up a bucket. “This is daub. It’s basically mud. A little more complicated than that, but not much. It’s pretty similar to the stuff you would use to make mud bricks. Your job is to use the trowel”—he held up a flat piece of wood with a handle like the one in Stella’s bucket of mud—“and use it to spread the daub on the wattle in a smooth even coat. And have a care, folks. This is liable to be part of the wall of your house. And if it’s not yours, it will be one of your neighbors.”

  They got to work, and it was hard work. The daub was thick and spreading it evenly over the wattle took effort. You had to pick up the wattle and rotate it to reach the far end. It took ten to fifteen minutes to finish a panel. Then you would raise a hand and an inspector would come around with a cart, look at it, and either point to places where the daub was uneven or didn’t cover everything, or put it on the cart to be taken to the drying shed.

  It was hard work, but it paid fifteen bucks an hour in ship credit and Stella was going to need every dime of that.

  214 12th Street, Fort Plymouth, Trinidad

  December 28, 321 BCE

  Stella climbed the short bamboo ladder to the ground floor that was four feet above the ground. President Wiley promised that they would get plumbing using bamboo as soon as possible, but for now there were composting toilets that amounted to honey buckets that would be picked up by carts that would come around daily. The flooring was rough planking with gaps. You wouldn’t fall through, but it was obvious that speed was the controlling factor in construction. No time was spent on fitting or finishing.

  The names of the streets were, for now at least, based on a grid of numbers and letters, and your place in town was based on your room on the ship. Twelfth Street was populated with passengers from Deck 6 aft inboard. It wasn’t a law. If you had the money, you could buy any plot of land you wanted in Fort Plymouth or outside it. But there was a discount for taking what was offered, and Stella was not flush.

  T
he “townhouses” were two-story post-and-daub buildings made of wood post panels. The panels consisted of a network of twigs that were then filled in with daub, the same stuff used to make mud bricks. They were made in standard frames in a central location and then carted to the townhouses to be installed. The second story was more of a loft than an actual second story, six feet high at the back and ten at the front.

  The floors were wood, split logs. The locals—one of the native tribes—built their houses on stilts, so they had logs. The Queen of the Sea fabricated a bunch of log splitters to turn logs into rough planking. But the labor involved made that expensive, so they only used it for the flooring. The walls were the mud daub. That was also the reason for townhouses. They were easier to build them in a batch than as individual houses. It also saved room, which the wall around Fort Plymouth put at a premium.

  Her townhouse now had a shape, but was still weeks away from livable. She went next door to look at Donald Carnegie’s place. He wasn’t up to making the visit himself, but he did know about plumbing, so he was working on the Queen with the five other plumbers who happened to be on the ship when The Event occurred. Not that she, or Don, were going to get indoor plumbing anytime soon.

  January 17, 320 BCE

  Moving day. Stella walked behind Donald as he lifted the walker with each step. He was on a limited diet now, to try to help with the diabetes, but it wasn’t working, not really. He was shaky and had trouble walking. When they got to the stairs up to the ground floor, she took the walker and lifted it to the front walk, while he held the railing. Then she helped him up the four steps to the wooden sidewalk, or front porch, depending on how you thought of it. Once up, she helped him into his front room where there was a chair and a bed, both of which were pulled from the Queen as the interior rooms on the ship were converted to workshops rather than sleeping places. Stella, without the income from helping design the plumbing system for Fort Plymouth that Don earned, was making do with a locally made bed, reeds in a sack on rope supports in a wood frame.