Bill 7 - the Galactic Hero (19 page)

But later, when he was helping an old woman haul her shopping cart out of a bomb crater, Calyfigia spoke again. “You're just a hired killer!” she said.

The old woman looked at him with alarm. “But not you,” he explained. “That means that the people who hired me last didn't order any killing. Yet.”

“Hah!” Calyfigia said.

“No, really,” Bill whimpered. “Killing people isn't fun.” He thought a moment. “I mean it can be satisfying, especially when they're trying to kill me. Except for officers, I never kill anyone for fun, and even that is really self-defense.”

“You could have resisted.”

“Resisted?” It was a shocking thought, one that had never occurred to Bill before. “How?”

“You didn't have to enlist.”

“I was drafted.” This wasn't strictly true, although Bill considered it morally true. Technically, there was no draft in the Empire, and Bill had signed the voluntary enlistment papers. Of course, he had been under the influence of hypnotic and ego-dissolving drugs at the time, and had no memory of signing the papers, but he had seen them, and that was his signature all right. But it hadn't been his idea, so he considered it the same as being drafted.

None of that mattered to Calyfigia, even if he'd explained it. “That is a feeble excuse,” she sneered. “You could have fled. Snuck over the border at night to avoid being drafted.”

“What border? The whole planet belonged to the Emperor.”

“Then, you could have resisted from inside the Troopers. But, oh no, you're a Galactic Hero, right? You should have been working for peace, trying to end wars instead of waging them. Why should you be loyal to people who leave you with a foot like that, and those ridiculous fangs?”

Bill stopped and looked at his foot. He liked this one pretty well; it was a lot better than some of the feet he'd had on his right leg. It wasn't as good as a real human foot, but it did a lot of things a real foot couldn't. And he'd gone to a lot of trouble to get those fangs. He didn't think they were ridiculous at all. This girl was being highly unreasonable.

He tried to explain how he had tried to work with Bgr the Chinger to promote peace, but he couldn't make any of his failed, half-hearted exploits sound very good, and he was a little uneasy bragging about what was, after all, treason.

Fortunately, he was interrupted by a new attack from the sky.

General Weissearse must have been seeing old war holos, because this attack began with a strafing run down the middle of the road. At the speed of an Imperial fighter, the bullets were coming down at about one every fifty yards, so most of them didn't hit anything, but the crowd was really panicked by the noise. They fled in all directions.

Bill took a quick look at the sky and saw that the first fighter had already passed — but another was heading their way. He shifted into drill instructor mode.

“GET OFF THE ROAD AND GET DOWN!” His voice boomed over the noise of the mob, and people started obeying like recruits — without any questions. He had to repeat the order a couple of times, but by the time the second fighter made its run, no one was standing in the middle of the road any more except Bill and Calyfigia.

He was watching the sky to see how the attack might develop. She was castigating him for ordering people around.

But the fighter was coming back. Bill pushed her aside and dived after her. She tumbled over a few times before landing in one of the conveniently placed bomb craters. He arrived an instant later. A slug whipped through the space where she'd been standing.

Bill climbed back onto the road, warning everyone else to stay as low as they could get. A third fighter was beginning its run.

He looked up and down the road. There were two bodies within a couple of hundred yards of him. He ran to the nearest. It was a small boy, not injured but too scared to move. Bill picked him up and threw him toward a crowd in a crater. “Catch!” he yelled.

Bill pounded down the broken highway toward the second body, looking back over his shoulder to keep track of the fighter. At most he only had a few seconds. His trained reflex when he saw the man was to call for a medic, but then he realized that there was no medic; there was no one but himself. It was only a flesh wound in the leg, but it had to be painful for the guy when Bill grabbed him and rolled them both over to the side of the road. The third fighter passed by, and Bill took a moment to tear off one sleeve of the man's shirt and tie it over the wound. He carried the man to safety, then went back for Calyfigia.

She was just climbing out of her crater. And she was just getting warmed up. “You've got a lot of gall, treating me like that —”

Bill shoved her back down and jumped in after. He landed right on top of her in the cramped space, knocking the breath out of her so she missed the fourth and final strafing run. He jumped up and out before she could start scolding him again.

Three of the fighters had gone on to more interesting targets with higher point values, but one of them was looping around for another attack.

Bill looked over the remains of the highway. There were no targets left for a strafing attack, except a couple of hovercars that hadn't run off the side. He knew that if he had been flying the fighter, a couple of abandoned cars weren't worth enough points to make the run worthwhile. In TAIL GUNNER! they wouldn't have been worth any points at all.

The pilot must have something else in mind.

“EVERYBODY STAY DOWN! THEY HAVEN'T FINISHED YET!” he shouted.

Naturally, Calyfigia was climbing back out of the crater. He tuned out what she was saying, something about his being an uneducated warmongering clod.

Bill didn't have much education and was mostly immune to instruction, but despite himself he had learned something about weapons systems in his years in the Troopers. He was trying to figure out which one the pilot would be likely to use against a bunch of scattered people.

“Hotbody,” he said.

“Well, yes, people have told me so, but it's none of your business, and don't change the subject. You have to raise your political consciousness, and understand your place in the war machine —”

“The Hotbody,” he interrupted, “is a multiple-warhead self-guiding heat-seeking missile. That's what I'd use if I was him.”

“'If I were him,' you mean,” Calyfigia corrected. The meaning of what he'd said sank in. “What do you mean?”

Bill started looking around for something he could use for defense. “I mean that it's a whole mess of little missiles that will be attracted by people's body heat.” There was nothing here except the hovercars — could he use their motors? no, they were all electric jobs — and a few wooden carts. “If you don't get down and stay down you're finished.” He looked straight at her and growled, baring his fangs. “Got that?” She bulged her eyes and nodded. “Now leave this to the expert.”

He glanced at the fighter. It hadn't fired anything yet. He ran to the nearest cart and dragged it out into the middle of the highway. Then he ran for another.

Bill managed to gather three carts before the two little dots separated from the larger dot of the fighter. He patted all his pockets, but he'd never taken up smoking, so he had no matches, not even in any of the secret compartments in his Swiss Army Foot.

Bingo! He hoisted his foot up, aimed the laser at the wood, and pressed the activator button. A condom popped out of its dispenser. Bill absently picked it up and stuck it in his shirt pocket. He pressed the button for the flame thrower. The bottle opener came out. He pushed it back in. He pulled the lever for the camp stove. The little magnifying glass popped out.

Bill grabbed the magnifier and held it a couple of inches from the nearest chunk of wood. He got the focus, held it and started blowing on the hot spot.

The two little dots were getting bigger and starting to spread out into clouds.

The wood started to smoke. Still holding the magnifying glass, Bill started puffing away, blowing for his life to get a flame.

And there it was at last!

Too dizzy to walk, Bill crawled in a direction he hoped was away from the fire. He made it a couple of yards before the two clouds of missiles gathered into the fire and blew themselves up, and him unconscious.

Bill woke up lying on something soft. He hadn't had too much experience of that lately, so he just stayed where he was, with his eyes closed.

He sighed, and gently flexed the various parts of his body that could have been damaged in the explosion. They all seemed to be there, and mostly undamaged. He moved his head a little bit, from side to side. It was still there, too, and as whole as it ever was.

But it was resting on something soft, and firm, and warm. Something that probably wasn't a pillow.

“You're awake?” It sounded like Calyfigia's voice, but it was soft, and friendly, and warm. Just like the thing that probably wasn't a pillow.

He came a little further awake.

Despite what might have seemed limitations on Bill's intellect, there were two circumstances in which he almost always became fully conscious. In combat, Bill had been hypno-trained to do anything needed to stay alive.

Bill was not so much of an expert in the other circumstance, but it did always get his full attention if he could retain his grip on consciousness at all.

“I'm awake,” he said.

The other circumstance, of course, was the prospect of intimate contact with a person of the female gender.

He opened his eyes. He was in the back seat of a luxury hovercar.

“The others explained to me what you did. I'd like to apologize for what I said to you. I had you all wrong.”

He looked up. Yes, that dark hair framing a pale face was Calyfigia all right. He wondered if she still had the lace nightie.

“Is there anything I can do,” she went on, “to make it up to you?”

Bill opened his mouth, started to speak, but she pressed a warm and gentle finger to his lips.

“No,” she husked. “Let's see if I can guess what it will be.”

Bill leaned back in the passenger seat of the hovercar. It was the only sort of vehicle that could negotiate the roads in their current state. The solar panels on the roof meant they didn't have to worry about finding fuel. Aside from a small problem going uphill — the constant smoky haze in the sky cut down on their power — it was sure a lovely way to travel.

Even hills weren't much of a problem, since they weren't going anyplace in particular.

The grateful crowd on the road had insisted that Bill and Calyfigia take the hovercar, and its owner, his arm well-twisted, had eventually, if grudgingly, agreed.

The car was really well equipped. The seats flipped back to make a lovely bed-like surface, there was air conditioning, auto-pilot, stereo and holovision, microwave oven, autobar, toilet, and Super Nintari GameDwarf system.

If he could only find a place to park away from the others — and find the seat-collapsing button — Bill would be in heaven. As it was, he drowned his frustrations in luxury while they kept steady pace with the other refugees.

Bill took a sip of his drink. The autobar had actually run out of alcohol by the first evening — the original owner and his friends had been raiding it pretty heavily — and now Bill was trying to develop a taste for beet daiquiris while the internal still whipped up a new supply. Beet daiquiris took a lot of getting used to, especially when made without rum, and Bill wasn't making a lot of progress.

In fact, he was bored. At first he'd enjoyed the feeling. He hadn't had much time to be bored since he'd become a trooper, and being bored was kind of interesting at first. But it soon got boring.

And Calyfigia didn't help much. She was a college student, and he had thought that would be exciting, but what it really meant was that as long as the others were there his libidinous ambitions had to be muzzled. So without alcohol or sex to occupy them she fell back on the college student's third interest. She talked about talking about ideas.

Now, Bill had had a number of ideas in his time. Most of them had involved ways of staying alive or getting a drink or a woman. But Calyfigia's ideas were completely unlike those ideas. Calyfigia's idea of a good idea was, “Let's consider Antonin Artaud's idea of the theater as pock de gibble pa kwoz.” Or at any rate, that's how it sounded to Bill, who had learned to stop listening when certain names came up in the conversation.

So he leaned back, sipped his alcohol-free beet daiquiri, and very quickly learned how to say “Very interesting” in his sleep.

Still, no one was trying to kill him, and there was always the chance they would find a place to park, and there were still plenty of lima beans and Brussels sprouts in the freezer, so they wouldn't starve. And he was catching up on his sleep.

Bill drifted off, dreaming of his youth on the farm, those carefree days when he would work from dawn to dusk shoveling manure or following his robomule down the furrows breaking clods and collecting stones. He heard once more his dear, sweet mother's voice calling him, felt once more the maternal cattle prod in the side with which she used to wake him. “Get up, bowb-breath.”

“Aww, Ma, do I have to?”

“Am I boring you, teensy-brain?”

“Aww, Ma —” Why was his mother talking like that?

Bill shook himself awake. Eyerack. Calyfigia. Right. He looked out the window and saw the entrance to an underground mall. He stretched once, then opened the door and stepped out, scanning the sky for warships. There were only a couple, and not coming this way.

Before he closed the door, Calyfigia stopped him. “Bill, are you bored?” He admitted as how he was. “As bored as I am?”

“Probably more.”

“Then you'll understand.” She pulled him down and gave him a memorable kiss on the lips. “I'm going to visit my folks.”

She slammed the door, and the hovercar took off in a cloud of dust.

Bill looked around.

He was all alone in an empty parking lot, with an entrance to a mall that did him no good, since he had no money. There was a road at the exit. He took it.

Bill tried strolling down the road, but he had been too well trained. Marching was in his blood now, even if he'd had the hypno-coils left out of these boots. And he had to admit that marching covered ground faster than strolling. He wasn't going anywhere in particular, but he'd get there a lot quicker by marching.