Hunter Legacy 11: Home Is Where the Hero Is (16 page)

"What do you mean we have
termites?"

Miriam had taken me back to my suite in the
small hours, and we'd only managed a couple of hours sleep before she left. It
was a difficult parting. For all we knew, we'd never see each other again, or
if we did, it could be in the middle of a war. We promised to keep in touch,
but I'm not sure either of us was going to this time. Both of us had our
commands. We were where we wanted to be, and it didn’t leave an overlap for us.
I'd once read a novel about a post captain of a Destroyer in World War Two, and
how he couldn’t think of anything else than his flotilla during enforced leave
while his own ship was repaired. It wasn’t the same, but I could see the same
level of thinking going on in Miriam, as each day passed and she wasn’t with
her Wing. It's the nature of command that you worry, even when there isn’t much
to worry about. She felt it, I felt it. We both knew the other knew it. We
kissed at the bottom of the stairs, and she walked up them without looking
back. Then she was gone.

Lightnings, and some of the faster Limos,
were now on their way to where our guests called home. We'd had a short goodbye
session on BigMother's Launch Deck, as one by one, all the ships which had
docked with us on our way up the spine, launched for their return journey.
Miriam, Greer and Vonda were taking a Limo back to Midgard. Given the long
journey for some, I'd offered some of our Lightnings and Limos so people could
travel a lot more comfortably, without being packed in. The bed versions were
more useful for long trips, but the seated versions had mainly been used since
we'd been collecting people close to home. Everyone left in comfort.

Janice's avatar had more or less frog
marched me to my office in the administration tower. There she dumped a whole
lot of work on me, stuff I couldn’t put off any longer. In my partied out
state, I wasn’t at all happy, but I methodically worked through it.

About midafternoon, I'd noticed this
report.

"How can you have termites on a space
station?" I repeated.

"How can you have termites on a space
station which was open to space when all the dirt went in?" I emphasized.

"They came in with some of the
topsoil," responded Janice. "Also in some of the wood used for making
park benches and garden bed surrounds. So none of them were exposed to
space."

"Well fuck it. Open it to space again
and kill the fuckers this time."

There was a silence.

"Sorry, did I say that out loud?"

"Jon," said Jane, "you need
a vacation."

"Janice, do I have time for a
holiday?"

"No. I estimate the paperwork you let
slide will take you about four months to catch up on."

"There you go."

I thought I heard Jane mutter something
about making sure I'd go, but it must have been a trick of the com system.

I signed off on the suggested methods of treatment,
idly wondering if termites needed oxygen or not.

Termites. Symbolic of something eating at
the structure of things. I guess it made sense then. My structure of things was
certainly on the fritze at the moment. So why not compound it by having things
physically eaten to throw it in your face.

I went back to work, only to be interrupted
by my parents. I looked up at one point, and they were just there. Huh. The
great hero who never notices anything happening around him.

"Are you okay dear?" asked Mum.

"I'm tired."

"I'm not surprised. How late did
Miriam keep you up last night after you left the party?"

"Mother!"

They both laughed.

"You need a vacation son," said
my father, in his command tone.

"Yes Dad. It's already tentatively
scheduled for about four months from now, when I'm not buried under a mountain
of digital paperwork."

"You should delegate more."

"Are you offering?"

"Hell no, I'm on vacation."

"Did you both want something?"

"Dinner tonight at our place?"
asked Mum. "Bring Aline and the twins."

"Fine with me, but you ask them
yourself."

"Son," started Dad, "what
really is the problem? And can we help?"

"You could have helped by ignoring the
damned Keeper all those years ago, and forced me to have a normal life."

"You don’t mean that dear."

I thought about it.

"No, I don’t."

"Spit it out dear."

"Six hundred years ago, people were
reading my life for entertainment. How the hell does anyone cope with something
like that?"

"Why do you need to?"

They hadn't responded to the first part, so
I had to assume they knew about it now. Maybe they'd had a session with the
Keeper as well?

I looked at him. He was so command all the
time. Give the orders and bollock out anyone who messed them up.

"Life is a novel, ignore it and move
on? That’s your advice Dad?"

"Does it need to be any more
complicated than that?"

I sighed. Maybe it wasn’t.

They left me to my work.

Dinner was just the six of us. They all
made a big attempt to cheer me up. I assumed Aline had heard from the twins,
but she said nothing. Apparently the twins had spent the morning showing my
parents around the station, and I was regaled with stories of how things had
changed while we'd been gone. The population had tripled for one thing, and
most of the areas of the station were now complete, and had people living
there. I should have been scheduling a tour myself, but I couldn’t raise enough
interest.

I begged off early, and left the girls
still chatting. Angel was waiting for me when I entered my suite. I carried her
into the bedroom, and patted her for as long as she held interest. After she
went in search of a snack, I lay there listening to her crunch biscuits in the
kitchen. I shifted my suit into a belt, and lay there in briefs and socks. A
few jerky movements, and I was lying where I normally slept, head on pillow.

I was sitting
in my command chair, in space.

No ship, no
life support, no nothing.

Just me, in my
chair, in space.

Space around
me was not familiar.

As I looked
around I saw no planets.

There were
many asteroid fields.

In the
distance, two gas giants.

A movement in
front of me caught my eye.

A black dot
had appeared at long range.

As I watched,
another dot appeared.

Then another.

Then ten, a
hundred, a thousand.

Space in front
of me turned black.

Suddenly I was
on a planet.

Ahead of me
was all black.

I was standing
in the center of a line of giant combat suits.

We fired into
the black with everything we had.

The black
washed over us.

One by one,
the combat suits fell, and stopped firing.

I was alone in
the black.

Darkness took
me.

I woke up on sand. The sun was shining. A
cool breeze blew softly across my skin. Aline was leaning over me. Topless. I
looked down. No, naked. I closed my eyes and waited to wake up again.

"Welcome back Jon."

I opened my eyes. The sand and sun were
still there, and Aline was still naked.

"Back? Have I been somewhere?"

"You tell me. I found you on your bed,
out cold, Angel franticly licking your face. I couldn’t wake you up either. Thirteen
told us you'd wake up when you were ready. We assumed you were off somewhere."

"Not as far as I know. I had the
nightmare again, only it had something more to it. The Darkness took me at the
end. How long was I out?"

"It's late-morning the next day."

"So I had a really good sleep. Except
I seem to still be dreaming because this is not my bed."

She laughed.

"No Jon. You really are on a
beach."

"Why?"

"Jane told us you were never going to
take a vacation on your own, so we took the opportunity to take you on vacation
while you were out."

"A beach?"

"This is Gold Coast. You remember you
own an island here."

My home away from home. I’d forgotten about
this one. I sat up, and looked up the beach. The mansion we'd captured from
pirates was there as I remembered it. I looked down. I was wearing shorts.

"Who else is here?"

"Just the twins. Jane ran us here in
Gunbus. Jeeves is pottering around somewhere."

I looked up and down the beach, but neither
twin was visible. Aline laughed again.

"They had a dip after we arrived here,
and settled down with the vids Jane wanted them to look at."

"So I'm the only one actually getting
a vacation?"

"We're getting the vacation. Oh, and
its doctor's orders too. I'm not allowed to let you go anywhere for a
week."

"Five days. Slice's new Cruiser comes
out of the shipyard then. I need to be there for the trials."

"Good. Let's go see what Jeeves has
for lunch."

Amanda joined us as soon as we entered the
dining room. Aleesha came in as a small buffet was being laid out. We picked at
the food, and sat eating for a while.

"I don’t think its Nexus," said
Amanda after a while.

"Nexus?"

"We're looking at the vids in order of
distance to here. So Nexus is first. I'm not all that far into it, but my gut
says it's not Nexus."

"I feel the same," added Aleesha.
"But Jane told us to be thorough. So we will be."

"How come you're doing this
here?"

"No interruptions," said Amanda.
"If we stayed on the station, BA would have been after us all the time for
her boot camp. We're fast forwarding as it is, but this task is going to take
days."

"And the rest," suggested
Aleesha.

"Okay, well don’t let me interrupt
you. Did you see the nightmare last night?"

"We did," said Amanda.
"Really odd. It was the original one, where you were alone."

"What about the new part?"

"What new part?" asked Aleesha.

"The line of combat suits?"

They looked at each other, and back to me.

"No extra Jon. You saw more?"

"Yes."

"You've seen the line of combat suits
before?" asked Aline. "Haven’t you Jon?"

"Several times now."

"And this time you saw the suits after
the darkness in space?"

"Yeah."

"What does that mean?" asked
Amanda.

I shivered. I had a pretty good idea what
it meant. No-one could see their own future.

"No idea," I said.

They looked at me as if they knew I was
lying, but didn’t want to challenge it.

"Come on Jon," said Aline.
"The girls have work to do, and we have some serious skinny dipping to get
on with."

Aline pulled me away from the table, walked
me into the master suite, where she pulled my shorts and briefs off. I shifted my
belt into shorts for the walk back to the beach, feeling a slightly tighter fit
around the groin than I normally felt, and she led me back to the beach. Now I
knew why I wore underwear. The suit adjusted to what it was going over.

The water, after we were naked again, was
just perfect. While we were splashing around, it occurred to me there was no
point in me having simulated shorts, since the only people there had seen me
naked many times before. What had I been thinking of? What the hell was wrong
with me?

Four days later, I felt relaxed and
content. My mood at the beginning had started me watching the original
Supernatural. I'd binge watched it, even while sunbaking on the beach using a
popup hollo screen, only stopping to make love to Aline, and get a little sleep.
I now had
Wayward Son on the brain. Only I kept hearing a slightly
different version, where I'd get peace when I was dead, rather than done. Being
done might be the same as being dead anyway. After all, to know is to die.
Oddly, I felt fine about that at the moment. Watching main characters keep
coming back time after time, did give one a sense of the ridiculous after all.
When the Darkness finally caught me, I'd be done with Prophesy. Done with
everything. No coming back for me. Peace at last.

Aline and I had started to bronze up. I was
de-stressing nicely. Watching other people's pretend stress was good for
removing stress. I could feel the difference in me. The months we'd been away,
travelling the length of the spine and back, long periods of boredom followed
by intense action and stark terror, fell away from me. It wasn’t enough, but it
was a good start.

It was Amanda who ruined it.

"Sorry to interrupt your beach time
Jon, but I think I've found the right image."

"Where?"

"Come and see for yourself."

"Be right there. I better shower
first."

She turned and walked briskly back inside,
while Aline gathered our towels and things, and followed after her. A short
shower turned into a longer shower.

"Jeez you two," said Aleesha,
peering in through the fogged up glass. "Get a room."

"We did," said Aline.

We all chuckled.

"Well now isn’t the time. You need to
see what we found."

I followed Aline out, we toweled off, put
on the basics, and shifted into 'slinky red'. Aleesha waited for us, and we
followed her into the mansion's main theatre room.

Amanda was waiting for us, and she
immediately threw a vid to the wall. The image was frozen, showing a sun,
asteroid fields, and two gas giants. Certainly what the nightmare had
contained, but not where they were.

She waved again, and the image began to
move in fast motion. The asteroids moved quickly, the gas giants slowly.

"Stop," I said suddenly, and
Amanda froze the image.

I pulled it out into full three dee, using
almost the entire room, and walked into it a little way.

"Here," I added.

The twins joined me.

"Yes," they said together.

"What system is this?" I asked.

"Pestilence," said Amanda.

"There is the Death jump point,"
said Aleesha, pointing into the image.

"When?" I asked.

"We don’t know," said Amanda.

"We need Jane for that," added
Aleesha.

"Thirteen, show your arse here
now!"

I looked around for him, and sure enough,
he was standing behind us. Aline jumped.

"How long have you been here?" I
asked him.

"I came with you."

"Well you don’t need to skulk anymore.
If you want to see the girls naked, just join them when they are, and be a real
person. If you’re here, be here. Or just plain piss off altogether."

"Fair comment, but you don’t need to
sound so bitter about it."

"You spied on us for a year. I call
that a very good reason for being pissed at you."

"Also a fair comment."

"Do you know when this will be?"

"Why would I?"

I sighed.

"One could shoot forward along the
timeline and tell you to the minute. I can't. I'm still time locked to you."

"Well tell One to get on with
it."

He laughed.

"Good luck with that."

"Fine. I'll message Jane to come get
us."

"Don’t bother. I'll be back in a
sec."

He vanished. And reappeared a few seconds
later.

"She'll be here in a few minutes. You
might want to spend that time packing."

"Wasn’t she on Hunter's Haven?"
asked Aline.

"She was. But I went back in time just
enough for Gunbus to make the journey back here."

"I thought you said you couldn’t
travel the timeline?"

"Going back is easy. Returning is just
as easy. Its forward from where you are now I can't do."

"That really chaps your arse, doesn’t
it?"

"More than you can possibly
know."

We all grinned at his discomfort.

Something landed on the roof, and very
shortly after, Jane joined us.

"We need to know when this is
Jane."

She went very still, and stayed that way
for an hour. We sat and waited. Aline rose after five minutes and went to pack
our stuff. She was back before, at last, Jane stirred.

"Confirmed. Pestilence system."

"When?"

"As near as I can tell, six months
from now."