Hero! (3 page)

A sim imaged in at his side, a girl in simple livery running with him. “You wish transportation, sir?” It wasn’t panting like him. Sims didn’t sweat, either.

He told it to bugger off, and it vanished. He went on alone, climbing steadily, listening to his feet pad on the pathway and the steady, strong beat of his heart. The sounds of merrymaking dwindled mercifully away.

The grade was gentle. He moved easily, enjoying the exertion in the hot fall night, thinking about the Q ship. Maeve assumed that the Patrol would deal with the problem. That was what the Patrol was for, wasn’t it?

Everyone thought that way about the Patrol.

He could remember when he’d thought that way, too.

M
EMORY…BACK IN Doggoth, a skinny recruit stands in a stuffy classroom with forty other skinny recruits, packed tight together, all shifting minutely from foot to foot and trying not to fidget in their unfamiliar uniforms. Collars cut at necks, boots pinch toes—and that particular recruit has never worn boots before. Somewhere machinery hums, rubbing on auditory nerves like sand. Everyone smells of soap, all scrubbed to the quick, and the boys’ faces have been depilated raw. On a platform up front, a flat-voiced officer pontificates with well-rehearsed sincerity as he delivers the official welcoming lecture.

He tells the Legend, and calls it History, and Recruit Vaun listens and believes with the others. Humanity evolves and grows to knowledge, trapped on a single world! Humanity discovers that not all quasars are distant galaxies, that some of them have proper motion among the stars and must be artifacts! Humanity reinvents the Q drive! Humanity strikes outward from ancestral Earth to inquire what beasties already voyage among the stars…

Not
aliens
. Not
sentients
. We of the Space Patrol call them
beasties
. And don’t you forget it.

There are no beasties near Ult.

Except politicians, of course.

You laugh when an officer makes a joke.

Louder!

That’s better.

Behind the explorers come the settlers, and the Empire of Mankind spreads outward through the galaxy.

But Q ships are potentially deadly, and they fly blind. Someone will have to control the traffic, for ancestral Earth has just as many petty, potty governments as Ult, or Bethyt, or any other of the million worlds. And so…And so the Space Patrol is formed, an organization dedicated to running the Q ships and keeping open the spaceways, an organization above planetary politics, servant of all humanity, owing allegiance only to High Command, back at the Center.

This is the Legend, but the officer calls it History, and the forty-one believe him. Recruit Vaun is part of thirty centuries of tradition! Recruit Vaun feels his bony chest swell with pride. His pulse beats in march time. Recruit Vaun swears sacred oaths to himself that he will be worthy…

S
URE. HOW EASY it had seemed then!

Civilians still believed all that crap. Many spacers believed it still. That gawky Ensign Blade with his squeaky-pressed uniform and iced-over eyes would certainly believe it. Even that underwitted, overmuscled, overboosted lieutenant likely believed it, with his glib talk of the Empire.

Panting hard, Vaun came to a crossing. The path went on, but a narrower, steeper track transected it. That was obviously meant for service vehicles, and it must lead up to the parking lot. Even without glow lamps, it would be a faster road. He accepted the challenge and took off up the service track.

As soon as he reached his torch, he would be long gone away from Maeve and her crimple-stinking Arkady. He wondered who hosted for her. She certainly would not lack for volunteers to share an estate so grand and a bed so generous.

There had never been an Empire.

Only the Patrol itself.

Thirty thousand years of tyranny disguised as service. Rape in the name of love.

Now the simple people of Ult would expect the Patrol to defend them from the runaway Q ship. Even Maeve, a minister in one of the larger governments, had not questioned the Patrol’s intent, nor its ability.

Except that there wasn’t any way to stop a Q ship. Not in these circumstances. Coming in on the ecliptic was blatant aiming. Even to lay a simple trajectory for a target planet was a breach of space law. The accepted procedure was a flight path that needed end-course correction, just so that there couldn’t be unfortunate accidents if things went wrong on the long voyage. There was no question that this brute was hostile.

And there was damned little the Patrol or anyone else could do about it now. If they threw up a missile or diverted an asteroid, it would just impact with the fireball. An asteroid vanishing to nothing in a singularity would emit enough hard radiation to cook the whole system, and the ship would be left unscathed. The intruder was only a third of an elwy away, and the time for throwing asteroids had passed. If death was their purpose, the bastards had won already…

Dark as a sewer…He raised his arms before him and slowed his pace to a trot.

They could have been stopped a year ago, maybe, but a year ago there had been insufficient evidence. Q ships still came to Ult from worlds farther in—rarely, of course, far fewer than in ancient times, when Ult itself had been part of the frontier—but there were still adventurers, exiles, and jittery refugees fleeing the Silence. After a journey of years, most voyagers had had enough, and even if they hadn’t, the local Patrol might evict them and replace them with its own people. There was no way to avoid planetfall, because the ships themselves needed attention. Heated by their own radiation almost to melting point, stressed between their singularities, Q ships, tended to stretch with time.

So some or all of the passengers would become settlers, buying entry rights with whatever scraps of unfamiliar technology they might have brought, and with their ship itself. The Patrol would refurbish it, rotate it to a new axis, and send it on again, outward to the frontier worlds. The new crew would be Ultian spacers, of course—keep it in the family. This steady Outward drift was what mankind had been doing since it fell out of a tree in some tropical corner of a minor world called Earth. It was the human way. Probably this one vessel had seemed no different from any of the others, except that it had come from Scyth.

That was significant! The Patrol should have been more vigilant. What had gone wrong? Tham was not only the most likely boy to know the answer to that question, Tham vyas almost the only high-ranking officer in the Patrol who might be willing to share the information with Vaun. Even if Roker had specifically ordered him not to, Tham would probably confide in Vaun if Vaun asked him to. Normally Vaun would not have forced him. Now Tham had withdrawn. Vaun had been viewing Tham’s retreat and the Q ship as two unrelated problems. Perhaps the running was clearing his head, for suddenly he decided that that was altogether too much of a…

A sim imaged in his path, a girl in a security uniform, with a gun on its hip. It glowed faintly, so that he would see it under the trees, and it held up a hand to stop him.

“Sir…”

Some trick of Maeve’s, trying to make him stay? Not likely.

Without a word, he ran right through the illusion and kept on going. Mirages couldn’t hurt him. Mirage guns couldn’t hurt him. Pants and shirt stuck coldly to his skin now, and his heart was racing, but the ground had leveled off at last and he must be close to the parking lot.

Then he heard a sudden rattle ahead of him, like dry sticks. With a stab of panic, he realized what the sim had been about to tell him.

Idiot!

Croaking aloud in his fear, Vaun sprawled to his knees on the path and ripped off his shirt.

K
RANTZ! WHAT AN idiot!

Most of the crops and all of the vertebrates on Ult had been imported by mankind. The native life-forms were all primitive, and yet there was one species that came dangerously near to sentience. That rustling close ahead of Vaun was the sound of a pepod.

If he had blundered into its privacy radius, then he was dead, and he would take a lot of other people with him. The rattle came again, sickeningly close. He curled over until his forehead was almost touching the ground, holding his forearms alongside his thighs to cover the cloth. The position was not dignified, and it made panting damnably hard, but it was the only way to face pepods. Either they regarded clothes as a threat, or else they enjoyed watching humans grovel.

The chill on Vaun’s back was fear and cooling sweat mixed. Mostly fear. Sweat trickled down from his armpits.
Idiot!

Rattle…To the eye, a pepod was an armchair-sized bush of hard twigs, but those twigs were pseudolimbs and mandibles and poison spines and eyestalks—and also antennae, for pepods had a germanium-silicon metabolism, and communicated by high-frequency radio. How close? The size of the defended area depended on the size of the unit itself. When a pepod felt threatened, it assembled all the others within range into a group organism and they all went berserk together.

Pebbles clinked, but Vaun was still alive.

Gravel dug into his knees and he smelled the cold earth.

Suddenly a voice whispered in his ear. Possibly a sim was bending over him—he did not look up. “The quasisentient commiserates on your elevated body temperature, sir.” Security was translating the radio jabber.

Vaun was shivering, but the pepod would be viewing him in far-infrared. Pepods favored the southern hemisphere, which was colder, and they disliked Angel, the supermassive star that warmed northern winters. In a few thousand years it would have drifted away, and the pepods would again inherit the planet.

“Inform the beastie that I also express my sympathies on the unpleasant weather.”

“I have done so. It wishes you good grazing.”

Vaun risked raising his head a little, to ease his neck. “Give it a suitable acknowledgment. Can I get up yet?”

“In a moment, sir. I congratulated it on its melodious song. It is moving away from the path, sir.”

As Vaun sat up and fumbled to find his sodden shirt, he felt fury replacing his fear. Pepods were an unpredictable hazard and also a real nuisance. Of necessity, the law everywhere protected them from molestation, but simple radio screamers would keep them away from human settlements. Why would Maeve tolerate a pepod on her grounds?

The only reason he could think of, as he stalked angrily on up the track, was that there were always pepods around Valhal.

V
AUN’S FAVORITE TORCH was a standard Patrol K47—a seat on a star, as the old song said—but his had been considerably souped up before he had acquired it, and he had added a few improvements since. The bench, for example, would fold down into a couch just barely large enough for two. Even a regulation K47 would fly a ballistic trajectory at the limits of the atmosphere, and a surprising number of girls were interested in trying things weightless.

He took off on manual, blasting straight up at max climb. The sonic boom would rattle Arkady a little. Admirals were expected to do things like that, and Maeve would learn that he had departed before Security told her so. She must already know of his encounter with the pepod, of course. Bitch! If she hadn’t made him so mad, he wouldn’t have been so cretinly stupid.

He set course for Valhal, seeing the Commonwealth spread out below him, ghostly blue in the Angellight, under a spooky sky of slate-colored velvet. The lights of Hiport gleamed to the north. Usually when he came this way, he would stop in there; that was why he had not known of Arkady, and Maeve.

Less than a dozen other stars were visible, the few that could compete with Angel. One day Angel would go supernova and take half the Bubble with it. Somewhere high off to the left was mythical Earth, three thousand elwies away. Sol was a nondescript star, visible at such a distance only through major telescopes. No one had heard from Earth in a long, long tune, or from any of the first worlds. Inside the Bubble was the Silence.

Scyth had gone silent thirty-odd years ago. But it had sent out the Q ship afterward, and that was very unusual. Tham said…

Krantz!

Like an echo of thunder came memory of the insight that the pepod had interrupted. Why should Tham suddenly withdraw, just when he was most needed? Yes, the galaxy was full of coincidences…It was full of trickery, too.

And anyway, what was Vaun doing, heading home to an empty bed when he hadn’t completed the task he’d set out on? What sort of famous hero ran from a few alarm signals? He reached for the controls again.

The party beacons would all be turned off now. There would be no girl tonight he could dazzle with thoughts of hostessing the famous Valhal and comforting the famous hero. No naked little redhead in his arms tonight. Nights without sex brought bad dreams.

He had more important things to do than sleep.

He banked as tightly as the safeties would let him and laid in a return course for Forhil, Tham’s place.

Famous hero…Vaun had killed Abbot and defeated the Brotherhood. This invading Q ship might be the Brotherhood’s revenge.

Scyth had gone silent thirty years ago—which meant about forty if you allowed for the time lag—and Tham believed that the Brotherhood had been responsible. Vaun had heard him say so more than once. True, Prior had come from Avalon. Abbot and
Unity
had come from Avalon, but Avalon had not succumbed to the Brotherhood yet—probably. A couple of years ago, when the Avalonian Patrol had finally answered Ultian Command’s urgent queries, Tham had passed the news to Vaun. The war had been won, the message said, the brethren on Avalon defeated and wiped out—and Avalonian Command had congratulated its Ultian comrades on their own victory against the infestation.

That message could have been a fake.

Scyth was part of the Brotherhood problem, too. Scyth’s sudden silence had come later, long after
Unity
had arrived at Ult, and this new, deadly Q ship had certainly originated from Scyth after that. So what was the Patrol up to? What was Roker up to? The high admiral was a prick of the first water, but he did not usually allow personalities to interfere with business. Why was Planetary Command not consulting its great hero, Admiral Vaun?