Hero! (4 page)

He was the expert on the Brotherhood, wasn’t he?

Despite Vaun’s brave lies to Maeve, he had no idea of the Patrol’s thinking on the threatening Q ship. He had tried to get through to Roker, but his calls had been refused.

And was Tham’s withdrawal at this critical moment mere coincidence, or was it Roker’s handiwork…or even the Brotherhood’s? The brethren had subverted the Patrol once before. They might try again.

Now the torch was so high that the sky had turned black. Angel was a blinding pinpoint that polarized a jagged purple blot in the canopy field, but now and again it flashed brilliantly off rambling watercourses on the dark world below.

Down there was the Putra Delta.

That was another reason Vaun never came this way.

In all the years since he first left his birthplace, he had only gone back once. He had left in silence, an outcast. He had returned in triumph, a hero. He could still taste that sour memory…

A
S THE TORCH canopy dephases, the heat hits him like a fist. Hot air steams in his lungs, a white brilliance of sunlight stabs knives in his eyes. He smells mud. His hands tremble as he grasps the edge of the hull to dismount.

He jumps down the last step, and grass squelches slimily below his boots. A tiny, sly voice in his right ear is prompting him, “Head higher. Look left…now right. Smile. Take a deep breath. You’re happy, dammit! That’s better. Now start to walk…”

The hero returns
. Smiling. Dazzled. Walking—a little faster, now—walking over to where the welcoming committee huddles in terror and bewilderment. The hidden cameras watch, so the world can watch.

Admiral’s epaulets weigh heavy on his shoulders. Already his chest glitters with medals and jeweled stars, and there are dozens more scheduled to come yet as the governments and rulers of the planet outdo one another in honoring the hero.

This is important for the Patrol, remember. Vaun’s a hero. Good old Vaun. He saved the world. Everyone wants to watch him coming home to tiny Puthain. Good for the Patrol.

Taxes—a chance to raise taxes…

“Looking happy,” the prompt says in his ear. “Looking happy. Hold out your arms now. Higher! Walking faster.’

The grass is muddy, spurting under his shoes. The smell of the river…How could he have forgotten the ever-present stink on the river, the oozy, black mud of the delta? Or forgotten the unending drone of brownflies, the sigh of the empty wind in the long green pozee grass; not a tree or a hill in sight, nor any building fit for human habitation. The watchers burst into cheering, all together.

Puthain? It’s been cleaned up specially for today’s show. Rustic simplicity is okay, but voters and taxpayers wouldn’t like squalor…Still only an ugly heap of driftwood, that’s all it is. They never called it
Puthain
when he was a child. Just the village. Probably the name has been invented to put it on the map: Puthain, birthplace of Admiral Vaun.

The hero.

But it’s only a litter of hovels half-drowned in the mud of the Putra Delta. He can smell eels under the mud smell. The scent makes his mouth water, although he has learned that eating eels is shameful. Now the crowd has been released and comes running forward, arms out. So few? But it’s a very small village…the boys and girls of the village, and the children of his age grown up now, and a new crop of stick-limbed, shock-haired youngsters replacing them, staring at his uniform. He recognizes Olmin…and Astos…Wanabis. Underfed, bony, been cleaned up for the occasion. At least half the girls are heavy with child. The boys beards have all been removed and the lower halves of their faces painted dark to match the sunburned bits. Beards are for savages. Bony, brown faces…more puzzled than resentful, more resentful than happy. What do they care? They forgot him years ago. Six years—is that all? He doesn’t belong here now.

He never did belong.

He wants to turn and run back to the torch; he wants that so badly his knees shake. This is worse than hunting Abbots through the bowels of a Q ship.

Faces…Faces missing. There’s only one face he really wants to see, and he won’t ever see that one again. He knows that, and yet he hasn’t been able to remember the village without remembering Nivel. Nivel isn’t here. Nivel would be smiling too, but Nivel’s smile would be real and shine in his eyes. It must be ten years ago now…One day just like any other day, and then somebody, somewhere, alarmed another pepod, and this one came flailing into a work gang with poison spines lashing and put eight boys and three girls into death agonies. A little place like this can’t afford screamers to keep the pepods away.

There were no cameras here that day.

Now the villagers are milling around, thinning out, backing away; puzzled, cowed, being prompted by hidden voices, moving so the cameras can see him, the hero being welcomed by his childhood friends. The freak is back.

Olmin is visibly shaking. Looks like he has to speak first. Place hasn’t got a mayor, hasn’t got a priest. Seems Olmin has been designated as Best Friend. That’s a bitter joke! Olmin the taunter? Olmin the tormentor? Olmin who sat on his chest and beat fists on his face. Olmin who peed on him while the others held him down. Very reasonable—they just wanted to see if pee would turn his hair the right color. It never did. Best Friend? Well, why not? The rest were no better. Did you ever scare me as much as you are scared right now, big-kid Olmin?

Missing faces…Glora isn’t there. They’d assured him that there would be no Glora. The Patrol doesn’t want the world to hear Admiral Vaun’s crazy mother screaming about meeting God and virgin birth and how she’s always known her son would save the world. Glora’s been taken away for treatment.

Olmin makes a croaking noise and lays an awkward, shaking hand on Vaun’s shoulder, frightened of dirtying the epaulet.

“Vaun!” He is licking his lips and listening to his prompter with his eyes so wide that the whites show all around the mud-brown irises. “It’s good…to see you…again. Vaun.” Pause. His scalp shines through his sandy hair.

Vaun waits for his cue, tries to hold a smile, watches the goiter lump jiggling in Olmin’s throat. Feels sudden anger—why isn’t the local booster adjusted for iodine deficiency?

Still Olmin’s turn. “And good…to be back…too, Vaun…I expect?”

“‘It’s always good to come home, Olmin,’” prompts the voice in Vaun’s ear.

He tries to say the words, and they stick in his throat like shit.

Good to come home? No, it’s horrible to come home. I hate this place! I hate the lot of you. You made my life a hell, all of you. If I saved the world, then it wasn’t for you. God knows, it wasn’t for any of you
.

“It’s always good to come home, Olmin.”

W
AS OLMIN STILL alive, down there in the dark, living out his belly-crawling existence in the mud of the delta? It wasn’t likely, because the peasants’ booster was crude, all-purpose stuff, not tailor-made like a spacer’s. But Vaun could almost hope he was, because a life like that was its own punishment. Long life to Olmin!

Now the torch was grazing the edges of space, where Angel could not hold back the flood of stars, and the night wore its finery. By habit, Vaun’s eyes sought out the constellation of the Swimmer, and the eye of the Swimmer—Alpha and Gamma, two reddish stars, the suns of Avalon. The suns that shone on Monad, where it all began…

Angel was almost at the zenith. Dawn must be near.

He laid back his seat in the torch; he reclined at ease in the little bubble and thought about ciphers and electronics and passwords and missiles. In theory the problem was simple—Commodore Tham was entitled to barricade himself inside Forhil to his heart’s content. If he wished, he could turn it into a modern version of one of those preindustrial castles whose ruins dotted the high borderlands. Vaun had flown over them a million times. Probably Commodore Tham would be technically breaking Commonwealth law if he actually fired any of his beams and missiles and brought down a torch and killed someone, but Commonwealth law wasn’t going to do much about an officer in the Space Patrol.

The Patrol itself, though…that was another matter. To shoot down an admiral must certainly be a breach of some regulation or other. It would show a lack of proper respect, at the very least. Furthermore, Commodore Tham did not own Forhil, although he was free to treat the place in every way as if he did. When he died, it would revert to the Patrol and be deeded to some other senior officer, and he in turn would hold it for a century or so. An admiral outranked a commodore handsomely, and Vaun could
order
Tham to admit him to Patrol territory. He might be reprimanded later for violating a subordinate officer’s privacy and privilege, but that was a trivial matter.

Unfortunately Tham was not accepting messages, so he could not receive the order. He had apparently put his defenses on automatic, to shoot on sight, regardless of rank.

High Admiral Roker himself, now, or any of the senior brass…they would know codes that could override anything Tham might use. That was the practical problem—Vaun was the famous hero, the holder of renowned Valhal, the finest estate on the planet, and so far as the world was concerned he had all the status of his exalted rank, but in fact Admiral Vaun was never provided with high-class passwords and ciphers. Not likely!

The more he thought about it, the less Vaun could accept the coincidence of timing between Tham’s withdrawal and the arrival of the approaching Q ship. There was dirty work afoot; waters were being muddied. If Roker was not behind it, then the Brotherhood was—at least two brethren had never been apprehended, and if they were still alive, out there somewhere, then they would certainly be still conspiring somehow. They would never give up. In either case, burning Vaun down out of the sky could be part of the plan, or at least an acceptable variation on it. Even Phalo’s call yesterday might have been contrived, although Phalo himself was as trustworthy as Tham.

None of which would matter if Vaun could somehow manipulate the electronics of his torch to make them manipulate the electronics of Tham’s defenses. And so he thought back to his days as a trainee, and racked his brains for everything he could remember from innumerable lectures. He came up with an enormous blank, a total void.

The Space Patrol was the biggest con job the galaxy had ever seen, on this and probably every other planet of the Bubble. States and churches, democracies, monarchies, empires, religions, faiths, philosophies…those were the visible rulers of the human body and soul, but behind and above them all, feeding on them, crouched the eternal aristocracy of the Patrol.

But Doggoth was one part of the Patrol legend that was factual. Indeed, Doggoth’s grim reputation was but a shadow of its reality.

Doggoth was a carefully crafted hell, a bleak, rocky torture house in the remote north. There was absolutely nothing at Doggoth except screaming weather and the Space Patrol Academy. To Doggoth came the adolescent scions of the great Patrol families, sons and daughters of commodores and admirals, and there all the easy decadence of their pampered upbringing was callously ripped out of them. Day after terrible day, in Doggoth they were systematically driven out of their wits—ill-treated, humiliated, destroyed, ground to paste. And when they had been reduced to suitably gibbering zombies, they were skillfully refashioned, rebuilt in the proper mold, as spacers.

Graduate or die. There was no other exit. By ancient tradition, trainees and instructors alike bore loaded weapons at all times. Even minor infractions were punished by firing squad, and dueling was encouraged. The suicide rate was unbelievable. But the process achieved its objective. The survivors returned to the world as junior officers, a triumphant elite, all staunchly convinced that the galaxy now owed them a living.

Vaun had been even more of an alien at Doggoth than he had been in the squalid delta hamlet of his childhood. At Puthain—if that had really been its name even then—he had been the wrong build, the wrong color, black-haired, black-eyed. He had been the bastard son of the local madwoman. He had suffered abominably.

At Doggoth he had been the mudslug, a contemptible, ignorant, incomprehensible peasant thrown in among the sons and daughters of the galactic aristocracy. They had considered that he spoke wrong, ate wrong, walked wrong, thought wrong. His mere existence among them had been inexplicable and inexcusable. They had despised him utterly, and done everything they could think of to drive him to despair and self-destruction.

But the mudslug had proved to be smarter and stronger and tougher than any of them. He had surmounted every obstacle, triumphed in every contest, come first in every class. The officers had promoted nonentities over him, refused him recognition, treated him like garbage, done their worst on him—one of the many incidental skills he had gained was an ability to go without sleep for days at a time. His classmates had spurned him, cheated on him, mocked him, ignored him, insulted him. After his first dozen duels, he had begun attracting the suicides, and learned to maim instead of kill; after that he had been challenged less often. He had stubbornly refused to turn his gun on himself no matter how often that solution had been recommended, because the most important lesson he had learned at Doggoth was that he was better than anyone else at anything.

That he had never forgotten.

Recruits entered as frightened youngsters. The survivors emerged after six months or so as aristocrats in ensigns’ uniforms, ready to rule the world.

Vaun had remained at Doggoth for five years, and never risen above the glorious rank of crewboy, second class. Had the Q ship
Unity
not arrived in the Ult system, he might be there still.

He had certainly learned everything there was to know about automatic defenses and missile systems and electronic recognition signals.

But he could think of nothing that would help him weasel his way into Forhil against Tham’s wishes.

The Patrol had been perfecting its security systems for thirty thousand years.

A
S THE YELLOW of dawn began to contest with Angel’s cold blues for possession of the east, as the torch began its long descent from the ionosphere, Vaun’s thoughts drifted to Tham himself. Tham was a solid, dependable boy—reticent and secretive, but emphatically not the sort of nervy quitter who would jump into withdrawal without as much as a farewell com to his friends. His family was Patrol stock from time beyond measure—Vaun had heard him mention in passing that his ancestors had come from Elgith in the
Golden Chariot
with the holy Joshual Krantz. Of course, if everyone who made that claim was to be credited, then
Golden Chariot
had carried a crew of several billion, but when Tham said it, a boy believed.