Freedom's Landing Read online

  PRAISE FOR ANNE MCCAFFREY’S FREEDOM SERIES

  FREEDOM’S LANDING

  “Not for nothing do her fans call the author ‘the Dragonlady’…She crafts a sci-fi adventure that will please followers of the genre and of the author.”

  —Dayton Daily News

  “Exciting and totally convincing…There can be only more action in the sequels McCaffrey presumably plans.”

  —Booklist

  “The narrative hits an admirable groove.”

  —Kirkus Reviews

  FREEDOM’S CHOICE

  “This episode of the Freedom saga is as exciting and convincing as the first.”

  —Booklist

  “The setting is crisp and expertly detailed, and the plot spins out smoothly…Readers will be eager for the next installment in the series.”

  —Publishers Weekly

  “A fun adventure. Plenty of new developments, some delightfully audacious.”

  —Locus

  FREEDOM’S CHALLENGE

  “Another rousing episode…The action is fast-paced and riveting, and the characters—human and of other species—are well limned and exhibit great individuality. McCaffrey continues to amaze with her ability to create disparate, well-realized worlds and to portray believable humans, convincing aliens of varied sorts, and credible interactions between them all. A very satisfying tale.”

  —Booklist

  “A saga of desperate courage and the desire for freedom.”

  —Library Journal

  “A good read, full of interesting characters and space-opera action.”

  —Locus

  “Rip-roaring adventure no science fiction fan could possibly resist.”

  —RT Book Reviews

  FREEDOM’S RANSOM

  “Touching and humorous.”

  —Publishers Weekly

  “McCaffrey is masterly at creating universes and characters so memorable that readers can slip comfortably back into [her] world…Full of humorous events as well as excitement, the fourth entry in McCaffrey’s Freedom series will be relished by fans.”

  —Booklist

  PRAISE FOR THE BESTSELLING NOVELS OF ANNE MCCAFFREY’S TOWER AND HIVE SERIES

  THE ROWAN

  “A reason for rejoicing.”

  —The Washington Times

  “One of the best McCaffrey novels.”

  —Locus

  “The Rowan introduces readers to the Gwyn-Raven dynasty…complete with an interstellar love affair steamy enough to attract those not usually interested in science fiction.”

  —Calgary Herald

  “A well-told tale…McCaffrey’s popularity is immense and justified.”

  —Booklist

  DAMIA

  “Dynamic.”

  —St. Louis Post-Dispatch

  “Holds the reader spellbound [with an] artful weave of romance and humor that infuses her characters.”

  —Calgary Herald

  “McCaffrey interweaves an engrossing romance with a coming-of-age story as she examines the issue of responsibility in a society where survival depends on the abilities of a gifted few.”

  —Publishers Weekly

  DAMIA’S CHILDREN

  “Winning, carefully developed young characters, an attractive alien society, and an enemy drawn with more than a touch of mystery.”

  —Publishers Weekly

  “McCaffrey’s fans won’t be disappointed…Fascinating in its exploration of the brain’s potential and untapped powers.”

  —The Calgary Sun

  “McCaffrey skillfully combines elements of family, adventure, action, and the intriguing possibilities of psychic phenomena.”

  —The Toledo Blade

  LYON’S PRIDE

  “McCaffrey’s protagonists remain as warm and appealing as ever.”

  —Publishers Weekly

  “McCaffrey continues to spin a good tale…All in all, a rich, compelling novel.”

  —Booklist

  “Another exciting episode in the thrilling epic of the Rowan…Read and enjoy!”

  —RT Book Reviews

  THE TOWER AND THE HIVE

  “Readers looking for intelligent, heroic adventure will find it here, and Rowan fans will be especially pleased at this felicitous closing of a popular SF series.”

  —Publishers Weekly

  “Fans of the series will plunge right in.”

  —Kirkus Reviews

  “The fifth installment in the author’s Rowan series brings to a satisfying culmination the tale of three generations of a uniquely gifted family while leaving room for future novels. McCaffrey’s skillful storytelling and fluid writing…make this a necessary purchase.”

  —Library Journal

  “McCaffrey maintains the high quality of characterization of humans and aliens alike, and, once again, she skillfully interweaves the plot threads, making it easy to follow the action on all fronts.”

  —Booklist

  Ace Books By Anne Mccaffrey

  The Tower and Hive Series

  THE ROWAN

  DAMIA

  DAMIA’S CHILDREN

  LYON’S PRIDE

  THE TOWER AND THE HIVE

  The Freedom Series

  FREEDOM’S LANDING

  FREEDOM’S CHOICE

  FREEDOM’S CHALLENGE

  FREEDOM’S RANSOM

  FREEDOM’S

  LANDING

  ANNE McCAFFREY

  THE BERKLEY PUBLISHING GROUP

  Published by the Penguin Group

  Penguin Group (USA) Inc.

  375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014, USA

  USA / Canada / UK / Ireland / Australia / New Zealand / India / South Africa / China

  Penguin Books Ltd., Registered Offices: 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England

  For more information about the Penguin Group, visit penguin.com.

  FREEDOM’S LANDING

  An Ace Book / published by arrangement with the author

  Copyright © 1995 by Anne McCaffrey.

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, scanned, or distributed in any printed or electronic form without permission. Please do not participate in or encourage piracy of copyrighted materials in violation of the author’s rights. Purchase only authorized editions.

  Ace Books are published by The Berkley Publishing Group.

  ACE and the “A” design are trademarks of Penguin Group (USA) Inc.

  For information, address: The Berkley Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Group (USA) Inc., 375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014.

  ISBN: 978-1-101-65590-0

  PUBLISHING HISTORY

  Ace/Putnam hardcover edition / May 1995

  Ace mass-market edition / June 1996

  Cover art by Shane Rebedschied / Shannon Associates.

  Cover design by Leslie Worrell.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  The publisher does not have any control over and does not assume any responsibility for author or third-party websites or their content.

  This book is dedicated to the

  memory of a special fan/friend,

  Judy Voros.

  Hope heaven had chocolate (but it must!).

  Table of Contents

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Te
n

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  L’envoi

  Chapter One

  KRISTIN BJORNSEN WONDERED IF SUMMER ON THE planet Barevi could possibly be the only season. There had been remarkably little variation in temperature in the nine months since she’d arrived there. She’d been four months in what appeared to be the single, sprawling city of the planet during her enslavement and now had racked up five months of comparative freedom—albeit a parlous hand-to-mouth survival—in this jungle, after her escape from the city in the flitter she’d stolen.

  Her sleeveless one-piece tunic was made of an indestructible material, but it wouldn’t suit cold weather. The scooped neckline was indecently low and the skirt ended midway down her long thighs. It was closely modeled, in fact, after the miniskirted sheath she’d been wearing to class that spring morning when the Catteni ships had descended on Denver, one of fifty cities across the world that had been used as object lessons by the conquerors. One moment she was on her way to the college campus; the next, she was one of thousands of astonished and terrified Denverites being driven by forcewhips up the ramp of a spaceship that made the Queen Elizabeth look like a tub toy. Once past the black maw of the ship, Kris, with all the others, swiftly succumbed to the odorless gas. When she and her fellow prisoners had awakened, they were in the slave compounds of Barevi, waiting to be sold.

  Kris aimed the avocado-sized pit of the gorupear she had just eaten at the central stalk of a nearby thicket of the purple-branched thornbushes. The bush instantly rained tiny darts in all directions. Kris laughed. She had bet it would take less than five minutes for the young bush to rearm itself. And it had. The larger ones took longer to position new missiles. She’d had reason to find out.

  Absently she reached above her head for another gorupear. Nothing from good old Terra rivaled them for taste. She bit appreciatively into the firm reddish flesh of the fruit, and its succulent juices dribbled down her chin onto her tanned breasts. Tugging at the strap of her slip-tight tunic, she brushed the juice away. The outfit was great for tanning, but when winter comes? And should she concentrate on gathering nuts and drying gorupears on the rocks by the river for the cold season? She wrinkled her nose at the half-eaten pear. They were mighty tasty but a steady diet of them left her hungering for other basic dietary requirements. By watching the creatures of the jungle, she’d been able to guess what might be edible for her. Remembering her survival course gave her the clue to superficial testing on her skin. She’d had two violent reactions to stuff the ground animals seemed to devour in quantity but the avians had guided her to other comestibles. Her term in the food preparation unit of her “master” had given her other commodities to look for—though few of those grew wild in this jungle. Still, there were little yellow-scaled fish from the river that had provided her with both protein and exercise.

  A low-pitched buzz attracted her attention. She got to her feet, balanced carefully on the high limb of the tree. Parting the branches, she peered up at the cloudless sky. Two of the umpteen moons that circled Barevi were visible in the west. Below them, dots that gave off sparkles of reflected sunlight were swooping and diving.

  The boys have called another hunt, she mused to herself and, still smiling, leaned against the tree trunk to take advantage of her grandstand seat. The jungle had quite a few really big, really savage creatures which she had managed to avoid, making like a jungle heroine and taking to the trees and vines. By dint of hard work and sweat, she had used the useful tools from the kit on the flitter to tie vines to trees that led to and from her favorite food-browsing spots and to the river. Her escape routes were all aerial.

  Before she had taken absence without leave from her “situation,” Kris had done her homework on more than what was edible on Barevi. She had picked up a good bit of the lingua Barevi, a polyglot language, made up from the words of six or seven of the languages spoken by the slaves and used by the “masters” to convey orders to their minions. She had gleaned some information about those who had invaded Earth, the Catteni. They were not, for one thing, indigenous to this world but came from a much heavier planet nearer galactic center. They were one of the mercenary-explorer races employed by a vast federation. They had only recently colonized Barevi, using it as a clearinghouse for spoils acquired looting unsuspecting non-federation planets, and a rest-and-relaxation center for their great ships’ crews. After years of the free fall of space and lighter-gravity planets, Catteni found it difficult to return to their heavy, depressing home world. During her brief enslavement, Kris had heard the Catteni boast of dying everywhere in the galaxy except Catten. The way they “played,” Kris thought to herself, was rough enough to insure that they died young as well as far from Catten.

  Huge predators roamed the unspoiled plains and jungles of Barevi, and the Catteni considered it great sport to stand up to a rhinolike monster with only a single spear. That is, Kris remembered with a grim smile, when they weren’t brawling among themselves over imagined slurs and insults. Two slaves, friends of hers, had been crushed under the massive bodies of Catteni during a free-for-all.

  Since she had come to the valley, she had witnessed half a dozen encounters between the rhinos and the Catteni. Accustomed to a much heavier gravity than Barevi, the Catteni were able to execute incredible maneuvers as they softened their prey for the kill. The poor creatures had less chance than Spanish bulls and, in all the hunts Kris had seen, only one man had been injured and that had been a slight graze.

  As the flitters neared, she realized that they were not acting like a hunting party. For one thing, one dot was considerably ahead of the others. And by God, she saw the light flashes of the trailing flitters’ forward guns firing at the “leader.”

  Hunted and hunters were at the foot of her valley now. Suddenly black smoke erupted from the rear of the pursued flitter. It nosed upward. It hovered reluctantly, then dove, slantingly, to strike the tumble of boulders along the river’s edge, not far from her hiding place.

  Kris gasped as she saw a figure, half-leaping, half-staggering out of the badly smashed flitter. She could scarcely believe that even a Catteni could survive such a crash. Wide-eyed, she watched as he struggled to his feet, then reeled from boulder to boulder, to get away from the smoldering wreck.

  With a stunningly brilliant flare, the craft exploded. Fragments whistled into the underbrush as far up the slope as her retreat, and the idiotic thornbushes she had recently triggered sprayed out their poison-tipped little darts.

  The smoke of the burning flitter obscured her view now and Kris lost sight of the man. The other flitters had reached the wreck and were hovering over it, like so many angry King-Kongish bees, swooping, diving, trying to penetrate the smoke.

  An afternoon breeze swirled the black clouds about and Kris caught glimpses of the man, lurching still further from the crash site. She saw him stumble and fall, after which he made no move to rise. Above, the bees buzzed angrily, circling the smoke and probably wondering if their prey had gone up in the explosion.

  Catteni didn’t hunt each other as a rule, she told herself, surprised to find that she was halfway down from her perch. They fight like Irishmen, sure, but to chase a man so far from the city? What could he have done?

  The crash had been too far away for Kris to distinguish the hunted man’s features or build. He might just be an escaped slave, like herself. If not Terran, he might be from one of the half-dozen other subjugated races that lived on Barevi. Someone who had had the guts to steal a flitter didn’t deserve to die under Catteni forcewhips.

  Kris made her way down the slope, careful to avoid the numerous thorn thickets that dominated these woods. She had once amused herself with the whimsy that the thorn were the gorupears’ protectors, for the two plants invariably grew close together.

  At the top of the sheer precipice above the falls of the river, she grabbed the vine she had attached there for speedy descent. Once on the riverbank she
stuck to the dry flat rocks until she came to the stepping-stones that allowed her to cross the river below the wide pool made by the little falls. Down a gully, across another thornbush-filled clearing, and then she was directly above the spot where she had last seen the man.

  Keeping close to the brown rocks so nearly the shade of her own tanned skin, she crossed the remaining distance. She all but tripped over him as the wind puffed black smoke down among the rocks.

  “Catteni!” she cried, furious as she bent to examine the unconscious man and recognized the gray and yellow uniform despite its tattered and black-smeared condition.

  With a disdainful foot under his shoulder, she tried to turn him over. And couldn’t. The man might as well have been a boulder. She knelt and yanked his head around by the thick slate-gray hair which, in a Catteni, did not indicate age: they all had the same color hair. Maybe he was dead?

  No such luck. He was breathing. A bruise mark on his temple showed one reason for his unconscious state. For a Catteni, he was almost good-looking. Most of them tended to have brutish, coarse features but this one had a straight, almost patrician nose, even if there was a lot more of it than an elephant would want to claim, and he had a wide well-shaped mouth. The Catteni to whom she had been sold had had thick, blubbery lips and she’d known that Catteni were developing a sexual appetite for Terran women.

  A sizzling crack jerked her head around in the direction of the wreck. The damned fools were shooting at the burning craft now. Kris looked down at the unconscious man, wondering what on earth he had done to provoke such vindictive thoroughness. They sure wanted him good and dead.

  The barrage pulverized what was left of the flitter, leaving the fire no fuel. The wind, laden with coarse dust, blew an acrid stench from the wreckage. The man stirred and vainly tried to raise himself, only to sink back to the ground with a groan. Kris saw the flitters circling to land on the plateau below the wreck.