Hero! (37 page)

“We shall come back here afterward,” Black says. “There will be time.”

“Of course,” Abbot agrees. “Now go.”

Later, as Vaun and his two companions are returning from the bridge where the destruct device now flashes seconds, heading for the patrol boat that will carry him away to exile, they pass by the domed hall, and along the entrance tunnel comes a sound Vaun thinks will haunt him forever—baritone and treble soaring together, the sound of the brethren singing.

T
HE ANCIENT SETTLEMENT of Kohab was exactly what it seemed—deserted. Any stray visitor would naturally check the buildings first, and find nothing there but pepods and traces of other visitors years before. The hive was hidden in the old mine tunnels, with only its torches of necessity kept aboveground.

The salty wind gusted and blustered over the stony moor, forcing Vaun to lean into it as young Tan guided him. Trekking westward, they had it right in their faces. The three adult boys were following close behind, escorting Feirn and Blade at the lens of Vaun’s hand-beam. With the Sheerfire tucked away in the hangar and the countryside rife with pepods, the two randoms weren’t going anywhere anyway.

Vaun had put them out of his mind for the time being. He felt almost light-headed, partly from lack of sleep, partly from the exhilaration of finding himself with his brethren, a long lifetime after he had parted from Dice and Raj. His kin. His people. He felt grateful for the wind to explain the watering of his eyes.

Tan was bearing the Giantkiller, but then he slid it off his shoulder and peered at it. Frowning, he hefted it in both hands. “Sure is heavy!” He sighed, then staggered in a stray gust.

“I’ll carry it for you,” Vaun said, glad of an excuse to remove such a catastrophe-creator from nimble adolescent fingers.

“Oh no, I just meant that the Series Twelve are much lighter. They have two more charges in the magazine than this old relic, and the sighting is calibrated at forty-hertzian increments out to a range of—”

“You’re a smart ass, you know that?”

The lad grinned with delight. “Of course! We all are, and you old units are all nervous hens. That bushie over there, the pepod? I could pick it off for you with this, easy.”

Vaun thumped his shoulder in boy-to-boy fashion. No one had ever called him an ‘old unit’ before, but of course he was, and of course he could not help liking this youngster. The youngster, for his part, was treating Vaun as he would any of his other adult brethren, as if they had shared toothbrushes all their lives. Back in the world of the wild stock, young males usually regarded Admiral Vaun as a demigod. The change was refreshing.

And Vaun had no love forpepods. “Go ahead. Let’s see you.”

Tan grinned, then sighed regretfully. “No shooting aboveground at Kohab. Too remote—shows up to satellites.”

Something in that remark implied that there were other places where such activity was permitted. Other hives?

“Besides,” Tan said wisely, “we try to keep on their good side, and shooting them isn’t part of our research program.”

“Your specialty?”

Tan nodded proudly, and slung the gun on his shoulder again.

“Teach me,” Vaun said, mentally contrasting this lithe slip of a lad with the other pepod expert he had met, the late human haystack, Quild. The two had nothing in common except an obvious desire to talk about pepods. There were many of the vermin in sight, scattered around without pattern. He now believed himself to be immune, although he would like to have that supposition confirmed before he tested it.

“Oh, they’re our biggest asset!” Tan said. “I mean look at the ground.”

“What about the ground?”

“Rocks, see? They keep turning over the slag, so our tracks never show. Keeps the hive hidden. And we don’t use screamers now, so any wilds that blunder in assume there’s nobody here. And they’re great guard dogs! We’re getting to know a lot of their communication, just lately.”

“And they don’t attack the…us?”

Tan shook his head. His dark eyes twinkled. “We didn’t know that until not very long ago. All the early work here was done behind screamers. Then one day a toddler wandered off and made friends with a pepod! Climbed right inside!”

“Yes?” Vaun said, suspecting what was coming.

“Actually…” Tan glanced behind him and then lowered his voice. “It was this unit.” He blushed. “Least, I think it was. I think I remember doing it, but I suppose I might have just seen another of my crop doing it, and be remembering that.”

“Then your choice of specialty is understandable.”

“Oh, that was just the luck of the draw. Lucky for me! I’m glad I’m a pepodist. I enjoy being a pepodist. Some units get stuck with specialties where they have to spend all their time reading books, for years and years, but there’s no book to read on the bushies! We’re writing it. There are four of us, and we’re doing very…or we were, until last night.” He pulled a face. “Weren’t counting on
that
!”

Curious, Vaun just strode along, and in a moment Tan added, “Thirteen thousand dead? We’d expected a lot more. A
lot
more!”

“It was almost twice that.”

“Really? Great! Of course, it would have been a lot more than that, even, without you!”

“Me? What did I have to do with it?”

“You restored order! I know you had to! Bishop told us what a smart move it was.”

“I don’t think I follow.”

“Well, I mean…” Tan sounded surprised. “The way you put it down! We were watching the pubcom, and there you were! Even the randoms were saying that only Admiral Vaun could have done what you managed, and how lucky everyone was that the Patrol had you on hand to organize the relief. We all had a good laugh!”

After a moment he added, “Well…to be honest, Brother…some of us wondered, even after Bishop explained. But you turning up here like this today…I mean, you don’t mind me saying this, do you? It just seemed so funny, seeing you helping the randoms.”

“No, I don’t mind. I understand.”

“Oh, good! It’s all right now, of course,” Tan said hastily. “Now you’ve come. No one’ll doubt any more. And Bishop did explain how it helped, and why you were doing it, taking their side, I mean, like, next time you won’t be there, will you? And without you, the stupid randoms’ll make their usual mess of things, and it’ll be much worse than they expect. So that’s good, but it was a shame it happened accidentally like that. The bushies never reacted that way before. Do you know why?”

“Yes,” Vaun said, but he wanted to keep Tan’s busy tongue at work. “It’s a long story. How well can you control them usually?”

“Not much. I mean, pepods aren’t
smart
. You can’t explain astronomy or evolution to a pepod, no matter how many you link up. And they’ve not much memory. You can say, ‘This biped good, that biped bad.’ That’s about as far as it goes. Next day it’s almost all gone again. Even the Great Pepod is dumber than a dog. Else it wouldn’t have attacked last night.”

The Great Pepod was presumably the same phenomenon as the late Professor Quild’s “holographic continuum.” Vaun preferred Tan’s terminology.

“How about, ‘Riot!’? Will that work? You going to be able to repeat last night? Can you rouse the Great Pepod deliberately?”

“Sure!” Tan insisted. “They’ll play their part on Die Day.” He sighed. “There won’t be so many, though, will there?”

“No,” Vaun agreed, thinking of the firestorms he had unleashed. “And the surprise won’t be so great.”

“Pity.”

Did the kid realize what he was saying? Had he thought through the consequences?

“Tan, I mean Brother…Do you know what happens to people when pepods go berserk? You ever seen it?”

“Yes.”

Vaun shot him a startled glance, but the youngster did not seem to notice. He went blithely on, yelling over the gale. “Of course it’s unkind, but it has to be done, doesn’t it? I mean, we can’t let them make the planet totally uninhabitable. We have to get their population down to sustainable limits somehow. If they breed like vermin, then they must expect to be treated like vermin.”

So that was what he had been brought up to believe? Prior had said much the same, Vaun remembered—the Brotherhood’s objective was to domesticate the wild stock. After seeing today what overpopulation had done to the once-fertile continent of Thisly, Vaun could admit that the argument had some validity.

Not the same species, Abbot had said.

“Hey!” said a voice at their back. “Nipper!”

Tan spun around, scowling. “Meaning me?”

“Yes, you,” said Orange. “Let’s detour around those.” He nodded at a group of pepods scrabbling among the pebbles just ahead.

“It’s all right. They’re far enough away.”

“No, let’s not take any risks.”

“I’m a pepodist, remember!” Tan announced grandly, raising his chin. “Prior sent me along to keep an eye on you and the bushies.”

“I’m one too,” Orange said gently. “And he sent
me
along to keep an eye on
you
.”

The lad deflated, and turned pink. Looking about three years younger than he had a moment before, he muttered, “
Freckles!
” as if that was an obscenity. Green and Violet were smirking.

Orange laughed, but without malice. “Normally you’d be correct, Brother, but we’ve got two wild stock with us.”

“Still awright,” Tan mumbled. “Outside attack radius.”

“Normally, yes. But the bushies may still be edgy, after last night, and we don’t want them getting used to seeing us associating with randoms, okay? So let’s play it safe and go around.”

Tan stalked off angrily at an angle to his previous course. The adults followed, grinning.

The pepods continued their scavenging, paying no attention as the two processions walked by at a safe distance. Straight ahead now, a weed-choked tunnel mouth came into view.

Vaun turned to his new neighbor, Orange. “That’s the hive, I assume?”

“That’s it. Welcome home.”

Home!
Yes, he did feel as if he was coming home, home from a lifetime sojourn in foreign lands. Surely such a feeling must be just imagined? Could it be genetic?

Orange looked chilled. The absence of a jacket might be mere bravado, or the need to let his companions see the color of his shirt—or the hive might be short of resources.

“Er…Admiral?”

Vaun gave him a hurt look.

He smiled and said, “Brother?”

“Yes?”

“If we have to put down these randoms anyway…we use randoms in our conditioning program.”

More than the wind caused Vaun to shiver then. He glanced around at the captives. Feirn was still clinging tightly to Blade, and having trouble with her impractical shoes on the stony ground. Blade was steadying her, but his eyes said he had caught the deadly implications of Orange’s remark.

“We dope them first, of course,” Orange added. “They don’t feel anything. Or not much.”

“Well, they might as well die usefully,” Vaun agreed.

Blade’s mauve eyes flickered. The girl had not heard, or not understood.

Very soon now Vaun must choose between the two species, random and brother. In a sense, he had never really had a choice before. He could have refused Raj, maybe, and stayed in the village, but then he had not known the game or the stakes. Roker had never offered Vaun a thinkable alternative.
Cooperate or die
was no choice. He had declared his loyalty to the Brotherhood in the Q ship, but it had brought him no freedom of action, for Abbot had immediately thrown him out, sending him back to Ult and the wild stock.

Ever since then he had served the Patrol, but that was what Abbot had told him to do, to demonstrate his loyalty so the Patrol would trust him and he could betray it eventually—now.

Where did the pendulum stop?

Very soon he must answer that question. From then on there could be no neutrality, no evading the issue. Then he would be a mass murderer also, one way or the other.

And a traitor, one way or the other.

The weeds masking the tunnel mouth, he noted, were artificial. Tan was waiting there with a broad grin, his juvenile sulks forgotten. “Welcome to Kohab Hive, Admiral Vaun.”

“Meaning me?”

The youth grinned ever wider. “Brother!”

“Brother!” Vaun agreed.

Tan proudly put a hand on his shoulder, and led him inside.

Home at last.

Love.

A
HEAVY BLACK drape blocked the tunnel, then behind that another. Tan pushed it aside and shouted, “Hey, guys, we got a visitor!” Four brethren had been sitting there reading, and they exploded to their feet with yells. Blinking in unfamiliar gloom, Vaun was once more mobbed by brothers.

Even here, in remote Kohab, he could not escape the hero worship, but now it brought tears to his eyes. So long they had trusted him! Barely a week went by without Admiral Vaun appearing in public somewhere on Ult—making speeches, leading appeals, dedicating monuments. He was the most celebrated celebrity Ult had ever known, the lion of the randoms, vanquisher of the Brotherhood. His unsuspected brethren had watched all his worldwide antics on pubcom and never once doubted that he was secretly on their side.

Prior had known.
When the chips are down, you’ll side with your kin
. And Abbot.
No brother will ever act against his hive
. Even Raj, who had promised to die for him.
You belong with us
.

And Maeve, the previous night.
They love one another, don’t they?

He had come home at last, to kin and hive.

As the hugs and backslapping died away, he saw the girl’s accusing glare, and Blade’s mauve eyes staring impassively, and for a moment shadows cooled his joy. But he had not invited either of them along. She was a stowaway. Every spacer officer swore to risk his life…So one had risked it and lost! Vaun had not known what was going to happen. He was not responsible for either of those two.

“Brother Vaun?” Green was shouting from a corner, clutching a telephone. He might be the Green who had met Vaun at the hangar, or he might be the Green who had been on guard duty. It didn’t matter. A telephone?