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  DAW BOOKS PROUDLY PRESENTS THE SCIENCE FICTION NOVELS OF W. MICHAEL GEAR:

  The Donovan Series

  Outpost

  Abandoned

  Pariah

  Unreconciled

  The Team Psi Series

  The Alpha Enigma

  Implacable Alpha*

  The Spider Trilogy

  The Warriors of Spider

  The Way of Spider

  The Web of Spider

  The Forbidden Borders Trilogy

  Requiem for the Conqueror

  Relic of Empire

  Countermeasures

  Starstrike

  The Artifact

  *Coming soon from DAW

  Copyright © 2021 by W. Michael Gear.

  All Rights Reserved.

  Jacket illustration by Steve Stone.

  Jacket design by Adam Auerbach.

  Edited by Sheila E. Gilbert.

  DAW Book Collectors No. 1886.

  Published by DAW Books, Inc.

  1745 Broadway, New York, NY 10019.

  All characters and events in this book are fictitious.

  Any resemblance to persons living or dead is strictly coincidental.

  The scanning, uploading, and distribution of this book via the Internet or via any other means without the permission of the publisher is illegal, and punishable by law. Please purchase only authorized electronic editions, and do not participate in or encourage the electronic piracy of copyrighted materials. Your support of the author’s rights is appreciated.

  Ebook ISBN: 9780756417178

  DAW TRADEMARK REGISTERED

  U.S. PAT. AND TM. OFF. AND FOREIGN COUNTRIES

  —MARCA REGISTRADA

  HECHO EN U.S.A.

  PRINTED IN THE U.S.A.

  pid_prh_5.7.0_c0_r0

  TO BRIAN AND LEXIE YARRINGTON

  FOR ALL THE YEARS OF BEER, FOOD, AND FELLOWSHIP.

  CONTENTS

  Cover

  Also by W. Michael Gear

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Acknowledgments

  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

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  Chapter 39

  Chapter 40

  Chapter 41

  Chapter 42

  Chapter 43

  Chapter 44

  Chapter 45

  Chapter 46

  Chapter 47

  Chapter 48

  Chapter 49

  Chapter 50

  Chapter 51

  Chapter 52

  Chapter 53

  Chapter 54

  Chapter 55

  Chapter 56

  Chapter 57

  Chapter 58

  Chapter 59

  Chapter 60

  Chapter 61

  Chapter 62

  Chapter 63

  Chapter 64

  Chapter 65

  Chapter 66

  Chapter 67

  Chapter 68

  Chapter 69

  Chapter 70

  Chapter 71

  Chapter 72

  Chapter 73

  Chapter 74

  Chapter 75

  Chapter 76

  Chapter 77

  Chapter 78

  Chapter 79

  Chapter 80

  Chapter 81

  Chapter 82

  Chapter 83

  Chapter 84

  Chapter 85

  Chapter 86

  Chapter 87

  Chapter 88

  Chapter 89

  Chapter 90

  Chapter 91

  Chapter 92

  Chapter 93

  Chapter 94

  Chapter 95

  Chapter 96

  Epilogue

  About the Author

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  Special appreciation goes to my old and dear friend, Sheila Gilbert, for standing by me through the insanity of a changing literary world. By the time this is published, we can only hope that political censors are a thing of the past and authors can write from their hearts without fear of reprisal. To better days and a return to freedom of speech. Thanks, Sheila, for helping to weather the storm and for your continued faith in the Donovan books.

  As always, my beloved Kathleen—center of my heart and the axis of my universe—has supported, been critical of, and kept the creative blood flowing through the Donovan universe. All that I am is because of her. You wouldn’t be reading this if Kathleen hadn’t been willing to seize the dream all those years ago when we were eating pizza on our first date. I owe her so much.

  1

  The long ocean swells might have been on Earth. Physics are physics after all. The same on Donovan as in the Pacific, Atlantic, or Indian Oceans; though the water here was a deeper blue—a sort of royal turquoise. These waves were running about a meter and a half, occasionally cresting into whitecaps as the foam was wicked off in streamers.

  The warm wind, too, could have been on Earth; it carried odors of salt and spray. It blew in from the northeast, gusting against the curved walls of the Maritime Research Unit’s Pod. The Pod was essentially a two-story sialon tube set north-south on pilings. With a small landing pad on the roof, a deck that could be raised or lowered to sea level on the northeast, and the Underwater Bay, a submerged submarine hanger and ocean access, the wind-blown tube now functioned as humanity’s lonely base for the exploration of Donovan’s oceans.

  If Scientific Director Michaela Hailwood was any judge of the weathervane atop the station’s high mast, it was blowing from about forty degrees and pushing close to ten knots. Overhead, low puffy bits of cloud rode the zephyr. Torn and twisted by turbulence, they seemed to dance against a background of higher cirrus in Donovan’s deeper-blue sky.

  Born on Apogee Station, Michaela had taken an improbable path to scientific director. Her African and European ancestors had come from industrial and urban stock, not to mention that station-born folk were rarely drawn to such fields as oceanography. She had reached the ripe age of forty-eight, stood right at six feet, and her build remained rail-thin—as did the rest of her team’s—after the years of privation during the ten-year-long transit from Solar System aboard Ashanti.

  Michaela centered her attention on the restless sea. Swells were all about friction: the interface of moving air on water. Donovan’s moon massed more than Luna did back in Solar System, so Donovanian tides could be fierce. But here, five hundred kilometers east of the nearest shoreline, and at this latitude, the effect was ameliorated.
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br />   More than a million years ago, a meteor strike had forever altered the continental landform. Blasted out the five-hundred-kilometer crater like taking a giant bite out of the coastline. Michaela’s research station had been situated on a narrow reef created by the ejecta. It was one of a line of shoals that ran like a string of beads around the Gulf’s eastern circumference. A million years of wave action and tides had worn down the land that had once protruded above the ocean’s surface.

  Donovan was a living world. The triangular sails of what her people had named seaskimmers could be seen in the distance. To date, Michaela and her team were unsure what they were. The closest analogy was that the seaskimmers were a Donovanian equivalent to the terrestrial Portuguese man-of-war, the small bladder-topped siphonophore. But there the comparison stopped. Seaskimmers were nearly thirty meters tall and similar to a lateen-rigged sailboat. Unlike a man-of-war, they had no subsurface tentacles but seemed to use wind power to chase down prey. The sail itself appeared to be a membrane, stiffened by something analogous to cartilage ribs that trailed filaments at the tips. To date, Michaela’s team hadn’t managed to get a closeup image of the creature’s lower and buoyant body, but it was streamlined, reminiscent of a racing hull. From the single blurred visual they’d taken, the creature had three eyes and a triangular mouth. Based on morphology, at least three different species of seaskimmers could be distinguished.

  And then, off in the distance, they’d also seen something that looked like a glowing cone with tentacles. The thing floated, apparently dangling its tentacles into the water, though what it might harvest outside of plankton was up for grabs.

  Michaela rubbed her arms against the chill coming off the water. The distant seaskimmers flipped in the wind, tacking eastward in unison. Capella’s light shimmered in the iridescent colors that rippled over the sails. Brilliant reds, yellows, greens, and blues flowed across the membrane in complex patterns.

  “Probably some form of communication,” she whispered, taken by the beauty of it. Communication by patterns and colors was one of the givens on Donovan. At least, that was the case on land where people now knew that quetzals and mobbers communicated by color and pattern. There was speculation that the invertebrates and perhaps even the plants did as well.

  She heard the hatch cycle behind her and turned as her second-in-command, Lee Shinwua, Shin for short, stepped out into the wind. Still looking half-starved, the man’s clothes hung on his broad-shouldered body. The stiff gusts played with his spacer-short black hair, and he squinted his nut-brown eyes into the wind, which accented their Asian cast. He was thirty-six with a PhD from ScrippsCal University. As with her origins in Apogee Station, Shinwua’s Uyghur roots wouldn’t have predisposed him to a degree in oceanography. Somehow, however, he’d managed to navigate the Corporate system, aced the exams, and landed a coveted appointment to the SCU. That he’d graduated magna cum laude, published prodigiously on deep-water resources, and cultivated the right sponsorship on the Board had wrangled him a place on Michaela’s team.

  Shin stepped up beside her, squinting into the wind’s bite. “Thought you might be here. Got a problem with the main refrigeration unit. Got Tobi Ruto working on it. Looks like it’s some sort of fried circuit. We don’t have a spare. Tobi’s not sure how to fix it.”

  She glanced at him. “No spare? Again?” Seemed like half the equipment they tried to fix didn’t have a spare, or if it did, it was the wrong part. For the first maritime expedition on Donovan, they were off to a rocky start. They had only been in the Pod for a week, unpacking, setting up, testing equipment, and preparing to initiate the first study of Donovan’s oceans. They had suffered one malfunction after another.

  Shin shrugged. “If we have one, it’s not in the listed inventory. I guess from what Tobi tells me, it’s a common sort of part that rarely fails, and if it does, you just order one. Dharman called Corporate Mine. They don’t have one. Not sure Port Authority does, either. But they’re asking around.”

  She chuckled dryly, eyes on the endless swells that rolled toward them to vanish beneath the platform and slosh against the Pod’s pilings. In Capella’s harsh light and crystalline water, she could see the reef three meters beneath the surface. Patterns of vegetation—in a mosaic of green and blue—mottled the water-worn rock. Something big, torpedo-like, jetted from under the pod to vanish from sight. Who knew what it might be?

  Michaela told him, “Have Tobi call Sheyela Smith, that electrician in Port Authority. If she doesn’t have the part, she’ll know how to jury rig something to make the refrigeration work.”

  “Um, doesn’t Sheyela Smith need to be, like, paid? You know, part of this market economy they’re so proud of? We have some sort of deal worked out with them?”

  “Supervisor Aguila said she’d dicker something until we could figure out a suitable method of compensation.” Michaela gave him a shrug. “It’s so weird. So different. Haphazard and chaotic. Back home everything was ordered. Even on Ashanti we knew where we fit, how it all worked.”

  Shin stuffed his hands into his back pockets. “Scary, huh? This whole world. I don’t get it. After everything we’ve been through. All the hell we lived on Ashanti: knowing the Unreconciled were eating each other down in Deck Three; the starvation; the years of being locked in that little space. We should be prepared for anything. You know that everyone’s on the edge of panic, don’t you? That it’s sinking in that we’re here. All alone.”

  She nodded, staring out at the waves. “It’s never been just us, Lee.”

  “Not on Ashanti, that’s for sure. We were surrounded by crew. And back on Earth? The whole of Solar System was just a short shuttle’s ride away.” A pause. “You been sleeping? Well, I mean?”

  Did she dare tell him?

  Taking a breath, she said, “It’s a new environment. Takes getting used to. Different sounds, different smells. Hell, even the beds are different. Brand new . . . never slept in. Everything’s clean and fresh. Like this air. It doesn’t stink of ship and human. And then there was that briefing Aguila and that Perez woman gave us back at Port Authority. Watch out for this monster, watch for that monster. Be careful of the wildlife. Donovan will try to kill you. Give it a while for our people to adjust.”

  He grunted, then said, “The kids are having nightmares. Lot of them wish they were back on the ship.” A beat. “And it’s not just the kids.”

  “Back on the ship? We prayed for ten years, desperate to get the hell out of Ashanti.” She didn’t dare tell Shin that she, too, dreamed of being locked back in the limited confines of Ashanti’s Crew Deck. And she did have nightmares. A recurring theme was of water cascading into her cramped quarters, rising, and there was no way out. Which was absurd; there wasn’t that much water aboard Ashanti.

  “It’s this.” Michaela waved an arm out at the endless waves marching their way. “The vast immensity of it. Nothing but water. In all directions. Endless water, endless sky, with no roof, no safe walls. And here we are, with just the Pod. Our little universe. Shouldn’t be any different than being locked in Ashanti, right? Or being out in the middle of the south Indian Ocean back on Earth.”

  “But it is.” Shin’s gaze fixed on the swells. Gave the impression that the Pod was moving instead of the water. “Okay, so I know the specs. I know what kind of forces the Pod can endure. The thing’s essentially crush-proof, can withstand just about anything the ocean can throw at it. Solid sialon casing and floors.” He rapped a knuckle against the white wall behind him. “But it’s like this thin shell is the only thing between us and drowning.”

  “You having nightmares of your own?”

  The dull acquiescence in his brown eyes provided all the answer she needed. Played right in concert with her own tortured dreams of sinking into dark water, of holding her breath. Desperate. Then finally gasping, sucking in an endless rush of cold ocean. Even awake and aware, she could still feel the cold filling her lungs,
the terror of drowning . . .

  Michaela shivered. Shook it off. Appalled that Lee had seen, knew her weakness. All of which triggered her sense of frustration and fury. Damn it, she was the Director of Scientific Research, second-in-command only to Board Supervisor Kalico Aguila. The Board had appointed Michaela to the Directorship because of her iron will, her expertise in the field. To show any—

  “It’s all right,” Shin interrupted her thoughts. “After all that time in Ashanti? There’re no secrets left. You can be human like the rest of us.”

  “No secrets left,” she whispered in agreement. “Isn’t that the truth?”

  They’d been packed together on Crew Deck after the Unreconciled had tried to seize the ship: twenty-three people jammed into four small cabins.

  They’d had no privacy. Had to live cramped together—ass to armpit as the saying went. Had to endure all the trials humans inflicted upon each other in close proximity. They’d fought, formed alliances that shifted through time, hated each other, loved each other, swapped partners, squabbled and made up, and finally sorted themselves into a sort of extended family. One that tolerated each other despite the histories, jealousies, sexual complications, and remembered slights. Well, all but Dr. Anna Carrasco Gabarron. She was like the despised aunt that everyone stoically endured as a sort of cosmic punishment for his or her sins.

  “You kept us sane, you know,” Shin told her. “Otherwise, we’d never have made it. You were the one who ordered us out of Deck Three. Sided with Captain Galluzzi before we could make any other choice.”

  So, did that make her any less timid now that they were dirtside, alone on an empty and hostile planet in the middle of an uncharted and unknown ocean? An ocean that, if they could trust the briefings the Supervisor had given them, was full of creatures that would try to kill them?

  A violent gust hit her, fluttering her coveralls, causing her to stagger. She ran a hand over the tight curls of her short black hair. “We’ll be fine. All of us, we’ve trained for this. We’re the best Solar System had to offer. Wind, waves, wildlife, we’re the experts. If anyone can make a go of it, it’s us.” A beat. “We just need to get out there, Shin. Get our hands dirty, start doing research, and everything will fall into place.”