Home / Pete's stuff / Not computer games / Pete's Draka page / "A Connecticut Yankee in the Archon's Court"

[to Home Page]

"A Connecticut Yankee in the Archon's Court"

 [up: Pete's Draka page]
Contact author

Another Draka fanfic by Pete Karsanow

 Last Updated: 2005-10-14

 

TABLE OF CONTENTS

 

 

Foreword

 

This is a "fanfic" novel (incomplete at present) set in the Draka universe of S.M. Stirling, who has not specifically approved it yet. Some personal information provided has been altered from that of real people. Prior knowledge of "The Stone Dogs" story and the entire Domination of the Draka timeline will vastly increase your enjoyment of the following.

The story here is speculation on dropping a present-day American from our world, or something close to it, into the world of the "Alliance for Democracy" and "Domination of the Draka" just before the Final War in 1998. I deliberately modified some details from our world, and made up a bunch about the Domination/Alliance world; for example, that the Alliance uses a Canadian/British postal code system of alternating numbers and letters. The point of divergence for Frank's world is described in Appendix A — it's too long to be a footnote. Details that I created about the Alliance/Domination timeline and Frank's world are discussed in footnotes to each chapter. As author of this fanfic, I made decisions about how some things happened in the world of the Domination of the Draka and Alliance for Democracy, without consulting S.M. Stirling. If there's heartburn with them, you know who to complain to - me! Should S.M. Stirling disagree with me, I'll be happy to change things to conform to The Author's vision, so don't get too attached to what I say below. And I'll endeavor to fit this story within "The Stone Dogs," so don't go reading this looking for the Draka to lose the Final War.

You can easily guess who Frank Carson and his family are based on. But Lucia Garcia is a composite of a real Master Sergeant and a civilian, using part of a third person's name. In general, lots of details are deliberately altered from our reality. "Mechanic's Union" is based on a real school in New York City that charges no tuition to the few students that it accepts. Yes, this is a "Mary Sue," but I hope to avoid the worst aspects of that.

All the chapter titles so far are references to Shawn Colvin songs. Quotes in the introductions of chapters are believed to be in the public domain or were created for this work.

Disclaimer: The Domination of the Draka, Alliance for Democracy, Marching Through Georgia, Under the Yoke, The Stone Dogs, and associated characters, alternate history, technology, organizations and situations are copyright © S.M. Stirling and may not be used or reproduced commercially without permission. The use of these characters, organizations, history, situations and places are not to be construed as challenge to said copyright. The author of this "fanfic" is receiving no profit or monetary income from providing it to you.

Peter Karsanow

 

 

 

Prologue

 

Moleholes are inherently chaotic, even those brought to macrocosmic levels for a known purpose by the careful application of power. They have often been observed to behave unstably even when no detectable variation in initial conditions was observed, and identical expansion protocols were followed. While remote interference by Samothracians cannot be ruled out, it is quite possible that these potential gateways across our own universe are unpredictably interacting with similar moleholes in alternate space-time continua. Some number of unexplained historical occurrences involving sudden appearances or disappearances might be caused by such phenomena.
unpublished notes, 442 F.S. (2442 A.D., 444 T.D.)
Tolya Mkenni d'Rohm, Reichart Station, Technical Directorate, Domination of the Draka1

 

 

Kirtland Air Force Base
Albuquerque, New Mexico
United States of America
Western Bloc
Friday March 27, 1998 A.D.
11:42 AM

 

"Warrior Fridays" was the military's response to the "dress-down Fridays" in more and more commercial establishments across the country, but it gave Frank Carson vague feelings of uneasiness to wear jeans and a "lumberjack" shirt to work even when it was permitted. At his previous job working for the Navy out at the remote China Lake weapons testing range, Frank had worn jeans every day, like all the other engineers, unless somebody important was visiting. But here, with a Major General in charge of the Air Force Operational Testing Agency2 headquarters at Kirtland, somebody important was always around. Even on a Friday with nothing on his appointment calendar, it wouldn't be unusual to be summoned to some Colonel's office or even the Technical Director's presence with no notice. That had happened two days before — finding a small note on his chair after coming in a few minutes late, and ending up in a day-long classified meeting in a small shielded room until almost 6 at night. So, while on Fridays the military personnel got to wear their camos or flight suits or whatever strange uniform they were authorized to wear from a previous assignment, civilians wore what they felt comfortable with.3 Frank Carson wore what he could quickly grab from the clean laundry pile, and hoped nobody would think he was a slob if he got called into a meeting with no notice. He usually wore the same clothes the next day. Weekends were often spent taking care of little Nicky and trying to keep the inquisitive 15 month-old boy out of trouble while his wife Anne worked one of her strange shifts at the airport.
This morning Frank was on a rare walk across the base, now heading back to his office after turning in a pile of paperwork to get reimbursed for his latest travel for the government. Las Vegas was a strange place to visit for anyone. Frank's work out there required riding an unmarked bus from a nondescript terminal building, far from the glamour of the Strip. The buses went to and from a place that nobody in the U.S. government would officially admit existed, but numerous people on the outside called Area 31. Some of them thought the government had UFOs there, or met aliens to plot further outrages against humanity, and tended to believe in alien abductions and massive conspiracies. Frank knew what went on at a small part of Area 31, but he'd never seen anything more alien than a British Air Commodore's handlebar mustache while out there.4 With the security restrictions about talking of work matters on the bus, unless you already knew somebody, you were reduced to banal platitudes, reading a book or looking out the window at the desolation going by for several hours each way. A plane service to the remote sections of the test range north of Las Vegas made sense, but Frank's work was never quite out that far, distance-wise. And since his contacts at the range never mentioned a plane, Frank never asked. That's the way it was in the murky realms of compartmented security — don't ask and don't tell, you never know what somebody else is cleared for unless introduced by somebody both of you know. With all the various things Frank had been cleared for, or "read out of" after doing his job, he sometimes wasn't sure what he was allowed to tell anybody anymore. There were just too many test programs using classified assets and procedures, and perhaps some of the secrecy was just to conceal that the assets and procedures weren't that good. That incompetence was classified appealed to his cynicism and vicious sense of humor.
His work on designing and testing radar jammers had brought him from a defense contractor job after college, to the Navy for several years, and now almost 2 years with the Air Force. So far, mild incompetence seemed to be pervasive, when security could conceal lapses in judgment and the spigot of defense spending was still wide open. These made Frank's occasional flashes of brilliance an indicator of a commodity in demand. He was still a young engineer on his way up, almost at the cusp of the "engineer or manager" decision that would shape the rest of his career.

Anyway, the chance to walk in the open air for a few minutes was welcome. At least, when cars and trucks weren't roaring by on the streets of the base. Maybe it had been the lower altitude at China Lake, or the strict California anti-pollution laws, but vehicles in Albuquerque noticeably stank to Frank, even after two years in New Mexico. Diesels especially bothered him; just a whiff of exhaust would start him toward nausea.
That made taking boat trips for scuba diving an interesting exercise in watching the wind to see which way the smoke was blowing. Sometimes he had to balance staying below decks and slowly getting seasick against standing on the open deck with a chance of tossing his cookies for another reason. But no diving in New Mexico, unless you counted the local aquarium to clean the glass. It hadn't been much easier in the middle of the Mojave Desert before, but at least China Lake had been a few hours drive away from the coast so he could get to Ventura quick enough. Now, diving was only a rare treat on vacation or long government travel to coastal locations. It was always a draining experience before he got in the water, making sure you had all the necessary equipment and it was all in working order, and having to check your buddy as well. But once under the surface, and the proper adjustments made to buoyancy, all the cares of the upper world dissolved. Under the sea, Frank found peace and the closest thing yet to his rare flying dreams. In those, he could zoom and twist and explore with no more than a thought. Diving was a lot like that, except for having to also pay attention to breathing and watching out for your own safety and that of your buddy in the alien undersea world. Returning to the surface, the increased weight once out of the water's embrace was accompanied by all the cares of the upper world. Job, family, and all the other worries that kept him awake some nights. A mental load in addition to the physical one. Wouldn't it be nice to stay underwater forever?
Frank's body was on automatic pilot, his stream of consciousness darting from subject to subject like a hummingbird, as he walked back to his office. With no more papers in his hands, having dropped it all off at the travel voucher counter, he was distracted from the thoughts that flitted through his head only by the brightness of the sunny spring day and the pre-lunch rumbling of his stomach.

A quick glance at his watch to confirm the time, and Frank estimated that Anne, his wife, would be either at home now, or leaving her job at the airport any minute. The people who ran the base's child care for the military and civilians were very particular about having a contact number in case of emergencies. Frank made a habit of always leaving his office number first. After that, Anne's work schedule was so variable that the order of her work number and their home number changed on a daily basis, depending on when she would return home. If anything happened to little Nicky, the child care center was sure to call somebody, and they got upset if parents weren't available to take a child home or authorize medical treatment immediately. So, Frank hoped that Anne's bosses at the airport hadn't asked her to stay late again. Anne hated getting up early in the morning when her schedule called for it, but she was still a pushover for helping out and staying past 8 hours on the clock. Frank had gotten used to not paying attention to her schedule, and taking care of Nicky, their only child so far, if he was the only parent around in the morning or evening. Odds were, nothing serious would happen to Nicky on any given day at the child care center. But at 15 months, Nikolaus Andrew was an active little boy with only a few months experience at walking, and prone to bumping into things or getting hit or bit by other kids in the room. Frank thought Nicky gave as good as he got, but the child care workers thought children at that age didn't know hitting others was bad, and just did it accidentally. After seeing his son scramble away several times after picking up something he shouldn't, looking back to see if he was being chased, Frank thought that toddlers really did know right and wrong at some instinctual level, but they wanted attention more. The people that thought little ones were no trouble obviously hadn't had to watch them for very long, or hadn't had an active boy like Nicky on their hands.

Frank approached the two-story building that housed his office. It was one of the oldest buildings on the base, built late in World War II when the Air Force had still been part of the Army, and had recently served as the base personnel office. That is, until a new personnel building was built two blocks away just last year, and the AFOTA had moved some people into this one while renovating some of their own similarly old buildings nearby. The way military funding worked, it was often easier to renovate an old building like the Pentagon several times than get a new one built. The Navy had a sneaky way around that by constructing small buildings for just under the oversight threshold, then connecting them with covered walkways. The Air Force renovated instead, or put people in rented buildings outside the base and then complained that they needed new ones built to avoid the rental and mileage expenses.5
The quickest way to Frank's office from this direction was to climb an outside staircase, open the heavy emergency exit door that had been blocked open, and walk a few feet down the narrow hallway towards his office. The downstairs back entrance with its brand-new security sensor, which only required waving his badge within a few inches of the wall plate, was around the corner of the building, and Frank wanted to save a few steps. The upstairs doors at the north and south ends of the building were often blocked open in violation of security rules during the workday, because even in early spring the building got terrifically hot inside. Part of the problem was that the heat ran full blast from mid-November on until somebody was allowed to turn on the inadequate cooling system in June, regardless of the local weather. Just one of the reasons the personnel folks had gotten a new building built, but his agency wasn't considerate enough about their people to do anything about it yet. There had been a renovation a few years ago that had put a new outside surface on the building, and replaced the original stairs. But even with new modular cubicles and office furniture inside, the heritage was still visible in the low ceilings and antiquated electrical wiring.
The new outside stairs were two flights separated by a small landing, with tubular steel railings and a black non-skid surface on the treads. They sprang from a large and crack-free concrete pad connected to a wheelchair ramp that led towards the street. How handicapped people would get up the stairs was unclear to Frank. Perhaps they were supposed to go around the corner of the building, and take another wheelchair ramp down a few inches to the level of the downstairs entrance at the back of the building. The back door was the only official entrance for now. Maybe someday the deep hole that blocked access to the front door would be filled in. Nobody in AFOTA seemed to know why it was there in the first place, or could get the base civil engineers to commit to a schedule for filling it.6

Suddenly, as Frank put a foot up on the lowest step of the outside staircase, a searing wave of pain began in his lower back. The same kind of pain that had made him unable to walk for several hours last Saturday; a muscle spasm, almost certainly a result of several minor car accidents and heavy lifting incidents in earlier years. The only thing to do was tolerate the pain, and carefully move to a place where he could take his medication and wait it out. Somehow, sitting in the car for over two hours had worked the last time. But it had been a hellish walk from the store across the parking lot to get there, even with his wife and a store clerk supporting him. Unfortunately, now Frank was two flights of stairs from his office or a long walk to his car in a distant parking lot. He had taken to leaving his wallet and his keys in his jacket pockets to avoid the imbalance to his back while walking with things in his pants pockets, especially with relatively tight jeans on. But on such a nice day, after the morning chill was gone, he had left the jacket hung up in his office. All he carried in his pants pockets was a few coins and a comb. A dosage of his pain medication was wrapped up in a tissue in his shirt pocket. His identification badge hung from a plastic strap around his neck, it was enough to get him on the base or into the secured areas he was cleared for.
Frank froze in place, hoping the pain would fade away of its own accord, or was caused by something he'd done earlier while walking. But with one leg up on a step, his back and now his raised leg were becoming sources of excruciating agony. Frank grabbed the handrails, and tried to push himself back from the stairs. Getting as much of his weight onto his arms had helped last time… But the pain flared even brighter as his raised foot started to drag backwards off the step. His last sensations were of falling backwards from the stairs, his arms beginning to swing wide in a trivial attempt to break his fall. A nova of agony, and unconsciousness was a blessed relief. Autonomic responses pulled his body up on one side into a semblance of a fetal curl, with the continuing pain provoking nervous twitches of his arms and legs, trying to minimize the agony.

A bright flash came from a midair source, and a crack of thunder boomed in the space near the bottom of the stairs, but Frank was unable to perceive them in his unconscious state. An opaque white hemisphere several meters across, and enclosing his entire body although not centered on it, momentarily appeared and then popped out of existence like a burst soap bubble. The curves where the sphere had intersected the ground and the stairs glowed bright red. They traced a circle at ground level, enclosing an area of cracked concrete slightly lower than the outside. Inside the circle, a construction of wood and metal looking like the bottom of an old flight of stairs stood for a second, then collapsed. It was soon buried by the collapse of the upper part of the outside stairs, which no longer had all of the supports they were designed for.
The people attracted to the scene by the noise were more interested in the body parts than the stairs debris. Two disembodied arms and a portion of one leg, all dressed in a camouflage outfit, lay in a heap just inside the edge of the circle on the ground, along with the toe of a black boot. One hand still clutched a flashlight, the other a small two-way "walkie-talkie" radio with the antenna extended. Smoke rose from the cut edges of fabric and flesh, and the edge of the circle. A wooden sawhorse stood just inside the edge of the circle, next to the pile of stairs debris that now covered a wide area both inside and outside the circle. A small cardboard sign tacked to the sawhorse read "BUILDING CONDEMNED — DO NOT ENTER." While one joker in the onlookers commented that this was fast work indeed for the base's civil engineers, it hadn't been there earlier.
There turned out to have been no witnesses to the incident, even though it happened close to a busy street. There had been no traffic passing the area during those few seconds, the nearby buildings had no windows with visibility of the area, and nobody that recalled seeing anything unusual there before the noise. Over an hour later, an AFOTA head count revealed that Frank Carson was unaccounted for. But after removing the debris of the collapsed stairs, Frank's body wasn't found, nor any sign he had been there.

Frank Carson was listed as a missing person, but his disappearance from the base was deliberately not linked to the appearance at his building, and that investigation soon ran out of leads after family and friends provided nothing useful. Because of his security clearance, the government soon became convinced he had suddenly defected to the Eastern Bloc, and began another round of counter-intelligence work to head off any more damage.
The site of the appearance event was quickly cordoned off by the base security squadron, but in just over three hours even they were evicted from the area by a group of people that arrived in unmarked vans. The team from the highly classified Lean Grass Monad Project7 collected all the physical evidence down to scrapings of the concrete, and quickly verified the area wasn't excessively radioactive or contaminated with hazardous chemicals. In their hidden laboratory situated on a remote part of Edwards Air Force Base in the Mojave Desert, the entire collection of items and surface samples were analyzed for clues to the nature of the appearance event. The flashlight soon proved to be unexceptional technically, but the part numbers matched nothing known, and the manufacturer name stamped on the case best corresponded to a family-owned hardware store in Minnesota. The "walkie-talkie" also didn't correspond to any currently manufactured, and provided several technical enigmas. It was set to a narrow frequency band mostly allocated to commercial taxi dispatch, and used an analog scrambling mechanism to mix the signal between several portions of the band simultaneously; a duplicate receiver had to be built just to confirm that the device was working properly. The circuitry was also built using some strange materials, all available on Earth, but some showing evidence of being processed in zero or micro-gravity. After carefully sanitizing their findings, the LGM Project let the theory behind the radio circuitry flow out through a briefing to a select group of defense contractors about 18 months after the incident occurred. The advanced analog technologies were thus eventually exploited by the wider defense community of the Western Bloc, but using digital conversion processing, giving them a momentary minor advantage in the constant struggle with the Eastern Bloc. The room-temperature superconductor material found in the radio's circuitry eventually caused the LGM Project to be disbanded, as nobody outside it could believe that the technology hadn't come from UFOs. After a well-intentioned leak to the press by a believer in alien abductions, the resulting widespread media interest compromised the project's secrecy. That the Eastern Bloc had full knowledge of the superconductor within days of the project's classified report to the President was the tip of yet another iceberg.8
Fingerprint and DNA analysis of the flesh found no match to any known persons, beyond a family resemblance to the DNA of a tribe in the Brazilian rain forest. No reports of any missing, injured, or dead persons matching the known injuries were received in the next year. The strange sawhorse and sign, different concrete composition and elevation inside the circle, and differing materials of the stairs debris inside and outside the area were found to be different than what was used in the surrounding area, but normal other than the "cut" edges. The U.S. Air Force finally officially explained the incident as an isolated terrorist attack that caused minor structural damage and injured the terrorist when the bomb exploded prematurely. This even though no demands were received, no similar incidents occurred in the next few years, and the body parts never led to a person.
Frank's disappearance was never officially linked to the incident, although some in the LGM Project suspected he had gone to where the strange items had come from, and his "missing" status was officially changed to "missing, presumed dead" after the legally required time elapsed. The CIA strongly suspected he had defected to hand over his classified knowledge for a life of privilege behind the Iron Curtain, and patiently waited for some news to filter out of their sources in the Eastern Bloc, but none ever came. Anne Carson eventually gave up hope for Frank's return, although she told Nicky as he grew about "Daddy Frank who used to take care of you." Beyond some pictures taken when he was a baby and her words, the young boy grew up with no memories of his birth father. He learned to call Anne's second husband "Dada" and then "Dad." Life went on.

 

> Forward to Chapter 1 >

 

Footnotes:

  1. Final Society (FS) dating is used by the Domination in "Drakon," Terran Dispersal (TD) by the Samothracians. "anno Domini" (AD) is for reference by the rest of us. Tolya's speculations were kept on her transducer, and were of course copied and saved in remote storage by TechSec. (back)
  2. The "Air Force Operational Testing Agency (AFOTA)" is the "Air Force Operational Test & Evaluation Center (AFOTEC)" in our time line (OTL). Other than the name, there's nothing different about what it does; AFOTEC started out as Air Force Test and Evaluation Center (AFTEC), "a separate operating agency," and added "Operational" later. (back)
  3. "Warrior Fridays" are real. (back)
  4. The gist is the same, but some of the details about "Area 31" have been significantly altered, except for the Air Commodore's mustache. (back)
  5. The various services' attitudes towards renovation or construction are real. Ask somebody for the definition of "secure" across the armed forces, it's literally a joke. (back)
  6. The situation at Frank's office building corresponds to OTL at the time referenced, but has since changed for the better. (back)
  7. The Lean Grass Monad Project is my own invention. Any resemblance to an actual classified project code name is purely coincidental, and could be hazardous to the author's "day job." (back)
  8. The story "Roachstompers" by S. M. Stirling appeared in the anthology "Power" which he also edited, and "New Destinies, Vol. VIII" (Baen 1989) as well, shows how the introduction of working cold fusion into "our world" could easily cause all kinds of unintended havoc. A working room-temperature superconductor would equal some substantial fraction of that. Let's draw a veil over Frank's home world though, and move on. (back)
  [to Home Page] [up: Pete's Draka page] [top of this page]  
What's New

Site Navigation

 [next: Connecticut Yankee Ch. 1] [to Sitemap]

Counter says: [a number only available as graphics] hits on this page since initialization.
The Draka characters and situations are copyright © S.M. Stirling and may not be used or reproduced commercially without permission. No profit is being made from the stories/documents/files found on this website.
By Peter Karsanow.
See the Home page for overall site and copyright information.

Hosted by www.Geocities.ws

1