Hero! (44 page)

The fire was burning low at a couple of spots. He jumped up and flashed a few of the pepods beyond it, widening his barricade.

Sixteen percent charge remaining.

The smoke billowed. He caught glimpses of hundreds of furiously writhing pepods around his fortress. He could hear their clickings as a steady roar. They weren’t going to give up.

He peered east. Feirn? The strip looked clear of pepods, as far as he could tell through his tears. There was a thin spot developing on the west of his laager. Feirn, where are you?

There!
Yes! There she was, one tiny figure running for the strip, and not a pepod in sight! But oh, so far from the hangar still! Hurry!

Then he heard the snap of a firearm and saw a thin line of green light that stretched from the northern horizon to end in his own chest.

As he went down he thought,
Damn! Now I’m not going to know how this ends
.

T
HERE IS NO pain, just a great pressure as if a huge lump of ice is growing in his lungs, a strange floating feeling. He cannot even feel the rock beneath him. His eyes blur, but the smoke seems to be thinning.

The question now is whether he can die before the pepods get him. His ears don’t seem able to distinguish fire noise from pepod. He tries to find the Giantkiller, but he can’t even find his hands.

Hurry, Feirn, hurry! You can do it now, Feirn! Get your ass out of here. Call home. Call your mommy. Call anyone. You’ll be a heroine, Feirn. Save the world, Feirn!

Hurry! I want to know what happens.

She should be there by now. What
is
the girl doing? Running a preflight check? Counting the airsickness bags? Hurry, Feirn, hurry! I want to know.

No pain, but the pressure in his chest is growing. He thinks he is about to split apart. Cold, cold…

She should be able to make it. No brethren in the way now, no pepods.

Except this is only one hive. There must be others. The Q ship is coming.

The smoke swirls, white and acrid, nipping his eyes. He blinks, trying to see. A brother is kneeling over him. Dice? Bishop? Maybe just an illusion. Vaun can’t make out the color of his shirt.

He can’t be here. Couldn’t have gotten past the pepods.

Vaun says, “Hello?” in a whisper so faint he can’t hear himself. He has no air in his lungs. Only blood.

But the brother has heard. He smiles Raj’s smile. “There’s help coming, Brother! Hang on!”

Illusion.

“We’ll save you, Brother.” It is Abbot’s voice, or is it Prior’s?

“I’m sorry,” Vaun says. “Really sorry. I was damaged, you see. I wasn’t hive-bred, and by the time I really knew who I was, I was imprinted with loyalty to the wrong hive. I didn’t want to kill you, Brother.”

The other takes his hand, and rubs it. Vaun sees that, does not feel it.

“It’s all right!” Sounds like Bishop. Fades into smoke; fades back again. “We understand, Brother Vaun. And it doesn’t really matter. Perhaps this hive will be destroyed, but that will not end the struggle. The randoms will fail in the end. Unsuccessful species die out. Successful species produce even better, and
then
die out. We are the Master Race, and eventually we must prevail.”

What does a Master Race do with the wild stock when it attains control? Put them in reserves, or zoos? In concentration camps? Gas a billion or two now and then? How big a grave for a billion people? Ten billion?

Scyth went silent. Thousands of worlds have gone silent, so that the others will not find out and be prepared.

Vaun says, “Yes, we are the Master Race. But when we have achieved perfection, what do we do then?”

Raj just smiles, and does not answer.

Life is struggle.

Then a great roar—he hears that. Something booms overhead, dark and bright against the baby-blue sky, and is gone.

“A torch!” he says. “She made it! I’m not dreaming, am I?”

Abbot shakes his head. “Not dreaming that. She made it. And listen!”

Vaun hears nothing, but he feels the ground tremble.

“Fuel tanks exploding,” his brother explains, smiling sadly. “The random turned the jets on the hangar. She torched the hangar with the torch! There will be no pursuit, and no evacuation.”

Bravely done! Safe journey, friend Feirn. Send marines soonest! Tell your mother I maybe did love her a little, perhaps
.

Hell, tell her I do love her and always did
.

Flash. The ground heaves, the hard rocks under his back.

“That was the Sheerfire,” he says silently, and closes his eyes. He wants to die before the pepods come for him, but when he looks again, the vague shape is still kneeling over him in the drifting smoke.

“I wish I understood,” Bishop says. “Even if you weren’t hivebred…We are supposed to be rational. I wish I knew why you chose the losing side.”

“They called me a hero, but I never was a hero. I was always just a traitor.”

“Yet I think the Patrol may soon put up a monument here—to a hero.”

“To Feirn, you mean? A heroine?”

“No,” Raj says, smiling. “Nor to Blade. There are wins and there are losses. The details vary, but the end is inevitable. You must know that. A hero might choose the losing side, but why should a traitor?”

If Vaun could breathe he might say something like,
Life is struggle and becoming. Perfection is failure. If God loves us, it is not in spite of our faults, it is because of them
. Who said that? Sounds like some of Tham’s sentimental crap.

And his brother would never understand.

“Because I think of them as people.”

His brother frowns. “Ah. That is a serious error. They do not think of us as people!”

“I do.”

“Of course. But you can never play on two teams. If you try to slay in the middle, you get hit from both sides.”

“It was ever thus,” Vaun agrees—or would agree, if he could breathe.

The Brotherhood is humanity’s greatest success, and its greatest folly. It is fitting, maybe, that
Homo sapiens
will fall to its own creation.

“Here come the others,” Bishop says. “It is time to go.”

Then blood rushes from Vaun’s mouth. A clamor of trumpet roars in his head and the sky darkens as his brothers crowd in. He is glad the pepods aren’t going to get him. This way’s better. He smiles a farewell to his brothers, and the brothers all smile back with Raj’s smile.

He isn’t going to know how it ends. But he wouldn’t have found out anyway. It won’t end. On world after world, the Brotherhood will keep trying, either winning or losing and trying again. Life is struggle. And this one will go on forever, and to the farthest stars.

RELATIVISTIC EFFECTS ARE negligible at one-third light speed, but there is considerable time lag. A Q ship takes 12 years to travel between Avalon and Ult from the point of view of the passengers—neglecting time for acceleration and deceleration, which adds a few months. An observer on Ult, though, sees the ship taking only 8 years, and an observer on Avalon 16 years.

A Boy’s Book of Space
(59th Edition, Cashalix, 29302)

T
HE MOST REMARKABLE feature of the Q drive is that its performance is almost independent of the size of the payload. In theory, a standard Q drive could move a planet. In practice, radiation and tidal stress set limits, which may best be illustrated by comparing the two types of Q ship, rocks and boats.

Despite the universal designation “rocks,” interstellar vessels are never fashioned from stony meteorite material, only from the nickel-iron variety. Asteroids of that type represent fragments of the cooled cores of differentiated planetesimals. Although originally homogeneous, they have been spalled from larger bodies by violent collisions; all of them now contain flaws and hidden fractures. The larger the rock, the greater the stress and the more numerous the flaws.

Because the Q drive works by pulling, not pushing, starships are in constant danger of falling apart. Ships as large as ten kilometers in diameter have been reported, hollowed out by generations of inhabitants into vast metallic cheeses. In the past, foolhardy souls attempted to convert even larger bodies, only to have their masterpieces fall apart along preexisting planes of weakness and swallow themselves. As tensional stress is greatest during acceleration and deceleration, Patrol regulations limit rocks to a velocity increment of one-half gee.

The Patrol also sets an absolute speed limit for rocks of 333 millicees, or one-third light speed, and less than that in certain areas of high dust content. The danger is radiation, for nowhere is space ever a perfect vacuum. Even at rest, a Q drive singularity will devour stray molecules, and when traveling at interstellar velocities, it sweeps up the galactic medium—gas and dust and stray cometary debris. Matter ripped apart by an infinite gravity gradient is converted to radiation, some of which escapes absorption. Depending on the speed of transit and the nature of the medium, frequencies from radio waves to hard gamma may be found in the resulting fireball. Gravitational redshift lengthens the wavelength of the radiation, which is why the first Q ships detected were for many years mistaken for quasars.

Thus the forward quasi mass not only provides the impetus to drive the ship, but also protects it from potentially disastrous impact. Several hundred meters of nickel-iron will suffice to shield the crew, but the rock itself corrodes at the molecular level, and in extreme cases may even melt. The main reason Q ships star-hop and shun very long runs is that years of stress at high temperatures tend to stretch the rock itself. During world stops, part of the Patrol’s standard refurbishment procedure is to rotate the drive 90 degrees, distributing the stress along another axis.

Boats, in contrast, are metal-skin vessels. No matter how large, they mass less than a millionth as much as their big brothers. With their small dimensions and superior tensile strength, they are little affected by tidal stress, and can safely accelerate at dozens of gees. Ironically, such extreme acceleration is unnecessary, as boats can never approach interstellar velocities without frying their occupants. They are restricted to interplanetary work, except for a small role in interstellar exploration as unmanned probes…

Rigorous explanation of the Q drive requires an analysis based on Morganian gravity waves. In lay terms the projectors may be described as creating virtual masses having location, infinitesimal duration, and no dimensions. The Q ship is impelled by its efforts to fall into a hole that is constantly appearing in front of it and vanishing before the ship arrives. The Patrol decries the popular terms “bootstrap machine” and “celestial carrot”…

If a Q drive projector merely created a single transitory quasi mass, it would violate the laws of conservation, but a single quasi mass is no more possible than a single magnetic monopole. The two virtual masses have opposite signs, and may be thought of as quasi matter and quasi antimatter, with a net pseudomass of zero. As both matter and antimatter have the same gravitational results, both act to draw the ship toward them.

Caught within two steep gravity gradients, each of which defines a different apparent center of mass (ACM), a rock must still move as a unit, and therefore a single effective center of mass (ECM) may be defined. The ship is accelerated or decelerated by moving the Moganian projector forward or aft of the ECM—which may not correspond exactly with the rest center of mass (RCM) even when the ship is traveling at constant velocity. At such times, bodies—including human bodies—situated forward of the ECM are accelerated faster than the ship, and hence sense “down” as being toward the bow. Aft of the ECM, the apparent gravity field is reversed, in an interesting Einsteinian comparison of gravity and inertia. Apparent gravitational effects during acceleration are more complex….

The quasi masses created are not as large as commonly believed. Typically, they are located about fifteen kilometers away from the ship. Assuming a ship diameter of five kilometers, an Earthlike mass would generate a gravitational field of almost 200,000 gee at the bow—somewhat excessive—and little more than half that at the rear. Add in the opposing effects of the rear quasi mass, and the result is a gravity gradient enough to disrupt any matter ever envisioned. A quasi mass equivalent to a small asteroid is adequate, and a Q ship may approach a planet without causing disaster, or even any appreciable tidal disturbance in the oceans. Remember though, that the quasi masses have no dimensions and thus constitute singularities. At close quarters the gravitational
gradient
becomes effectively infinite.

The aft quasi mass does more than maintain the laws of physics. Because space is never empty, a Q ship cannot just coast after reaching cruising velocity. The forward singularity must be maintained to defend the ship from impact with the galactic medium, and thus without the braking action of the rear quasi mass, Q ships would accelerate indefinitely to relativistic speeds. Once the desired velocity has been obtained, therefore, the projector is moved forward until the attractions balance, and net acceleration becomes zero. For deceleration, of course, the projector is merely moved farther forward yet.

Rocks are not designed to be nimble; space is so huge that they can normally just line up on their targets and go. Any significant change of course at high velocity would require displacing the forward singularity with respect to the line of flight, thus exposing the rock itself to the impact of the interstellar medium…

The Q drive itself should not be confused with pseudo-gravity, which is a short-range, low-intensity field used mainly to make shipboard life more comfortable for crew and passengers when the Q drive in not in use…

Ibid.