The Forever Hero

by L. E. Modesitt Jr.

  “Now…we’re not organized for full round the clock operations, but you’ve all seen the combat roster. For the first few days, however, I intend to double the officer count. There will be two officers on duty at all times. For these purposes, Cadet Gerswin will be included on the duty roster as junior Gunnery officer. To balance his inexperience, he will be paired initially with me. Chief Technician Alvera and Sub-Chief Gorta will head the duty techs.

  “Senior Lieutenant Swabo will act as Gunnery officer in my absence.”

  The major waited for the duty pairings to sink in.

  Lieutenant G’Maine frowned momentarily, with a puzzled expression following almost immediately.

  “You expect some action, ser. When Newparra has been part of the Empire for so long?”

  “This is the third quarantine of Newparra, Lieutenant. That may well be a record. The government has been a compromise between radical Christers and Istvennists. By definition, a quarantine is called when no one government controls the entire system. Unfortunately, while the overall level of technology is moderate, the government has maintained nearly twenty jumpships of all classes.”

  Gerswin kept himself from nodding. While the jumpships were not supposed to be armed, a revolutionary or embattled status government could certainly do so.

  “The Empire has always taken a strong stand against revolutionaries being able to export their ideals or wars or to import weapons and other support. That’s why we have quarantines. But none of this should be news to any of you. Read the backgrounder. Then I’ll answer questions.”

  Ding!

  The screen chime punctuated the major’s last sentence.

  “All hands! All hands! Ten minutes until jump. Ten minutes until jump.”

  The major nodded, then concluded, “The first duty tour will be Lieutenant Swabo and Lieutenant G’Maine. If this lasts as long as it probably will, in time we’ll go to the one in three roster, with Cadet Gerswin as backup.”

  Gerswin understood, he thought. Until the major had the chance to settle G’Maine and him down, she and Swabo would be keeping a close watch to insure neither went off half-blasted. But the major also knew that a four on, four off routine was too fatiguing to be effective beyond a few days.

  “Dismissed.”

  Gerswin hurried back to the closet that doubled as his cabin to ready for the jump.

  Tammilan was not there, probably relishing taking the jump at the duty station of the absent third navigator.

  As Gerswin strapped in, the screen chime rang again.

  Ding!

  “All hands! All hands! Stand by for jump. Stand by for jump.”

  The blackness and dislocation seemed longer this time, but his experience was so limited Gerswin had no idea whether the subjective feeling meant anything at all.

  The second jump was less than ten minutes after the first, and, if anything, seemed to last longer than the earlier jump.

  Gerswin wondered if every jump seemed to take longer than the previous one, despite the indoctrination materials which had indicated that the objective and subjective time of jump was constant. Not for him, they didn’t seem constant.

  After the second jump toward Newparra, he unstrapped and sat up. There was no reason he couldn’t go back to the Gunnery operations center, although he didn’t see why he needed to, either. He wasn’t hungry and he’d already missed more sleep than he’d intended on this cruise. All he could do as the Fordin headed in-system was to get in the way.

  Yawning, he stood up and undressed, leaving his uniform laid out. Then he climbed back into the bunk, and, as a precaution, loosely adjusted the restraining webs.

  For a time he stared at the flat underside of Tammilan’s bunk before drifting into sleep.

  Tammilan tiptoed in several minutes later, as he was about to drift off. She did not stay, but merely picked up a clean uniform and left. Gerswin did not look over at her, but wondered why she was so secretive about her actions. The entire ship knew she spent more time with the number two navigator than in her own quarters, but who cared? That was her business, and if she hadn’t been a cadet, the official cabin arrangements merely would have been changed.

  He thought he woke twice with the lurching of a sudden course shift as the gravfield generators compensated for the stress, but with no announcements following in either case, he went back to sleep.

  After waking in the still-empty cabin, running himself through the tiny fresher, dressing, and grabbing some fruit and cheese from the open snack table in the Officers’ Mess, he made his way back to the Gunnery operations center for his first watch with Major Trillo.

  Gerswin slipped behind the console next to the senior tech, Alvera, with only a nod from the departing G’Maine.

  Alvera, a small man with jet black hair and eyes and a jerkiness to every movement, jabbed at the screen.

  “Cadet. Here’s the status. Inbound from exit corridor two.” His thin index finger pointed to a green blip on the representational screen. “Here. Comm is running sweep and comm screen analysis. Nav has pulled deep EDI traces. Results came in about ten minutes ago. Solid contact shows in red. Conditional contact in amber. One of ours in green. Understand?”

  “I think so.”

  Alvera pointed to the small screens to the left of the larger representational screen. “Top is punch laser. Energy available. Second shows tachead status and support data. Third is hellburners.”

  The senior tech looked directly and pointedly into Gerswin’s eyes.

  “Got that?”

  “Yes.”

  “Fine. Unless something looks wrong, you do nothing. Nothing, understand? My techs make sure these figures are right. You’re the backup to the major. You should know every number on these screens, what they mean. You don’t. You might learn. I’ll try and teach you.”

  Gerswin did not smile at the man’s nervous energy, but instead nodded his head thoughtfully.

  “I think I understand. You and your techs provide all the inputs. The major recommends to the bridge. I watch. If something looks strange, unless it’s an emergency, I ask you or the senior tech. I keep quiet until I understand what it all means.”

  “That’s right, Cadet.” Alvera nodded. “Learn now. Someday you’ll be the one making those recommendations, or, maybe, having to act on them. Better know what they mean.”

  Gerswin nodded once more and began to concentrate on the representational screens, which showed a series of red blips around the fourth planet, Newparra itself, and two red blips circling the third planet, with a lone red blip around the sixth planet, the inner of the system’s two gas giants.

  The blip closest to the Fordin was amber, outside the seventh planet, with a vector indicator showing an outward course that would intersect the Fordin’s path in roughly a standard hour. A standard hour?

  Gerswin’s fingers touched his own comp screen and keys.

  The screen confirmed that if the amber blip was a ship, it would intersect the Fordin’s path in one point three standard hours.

  “Did we shift course for intercept?”

  Alvera nodded. “About one stan ago.”

  Gerswin inclined his head toward the representational plot. “How accurate is that? How many don’t show?”

  “Good question. Right now, we couldn’t pick up anything under corvette size unless it was on full-drive or talking wideband to the universe.”

  A green light winked in on the top side of the board, across the system from the Fordin, then was jumped inward abruptly as the techs made the real time adjustments.

  “How many exit corridors does the system have?”

  “Not much dust here. Two that are almost particle free. If you don’t mind the skewing and the extra energy costs, no absolute need for corridor use.”

  Gerswin frowned. The only way to control system entrance or exit realistically would seem to be by an orbit patrol of Newparra and the industrial centers on the third planet, and on the two major moons of the sixth planet. But, i
f the Fordin, as the heavy of the quarantine squadron, took station off Newparra, that left two search cruisers and two corvettes to cover the rest of the system.

  Glad he didn’t have to decide the positioning of the Imperial ships, he returned his full attention to the screens, noting that the amber blip approaching the Fordin had become a red blip with a notation symbol beside it.

  Rather than ask Alvera what the symbol meant he tried to get an answer from his own screen, but stopped after two unsuccessful tries at asking the system for a coded symbol that neither appeared on the keyboard nor in answer to the standard inquiries.

  “Chief…how do you interrogate for the symbols beside the blips?”

  Alvera chuckled. “Can’t get there unless you’ve already been there. Right?”

  Gerswin shrugged.

  “Ask for SKS. Stands for ‘screen key symbols.’ Follow with ‘Gun’ or you’ll get the nav and comm codes as well. The symbols will all display on your work screen, along with the working subscript. That’s what you use for your inquiries. Simple enough.”

  Gerswin dutifully followed the instructions and discovered that the approaching blip was listed as a “system heavy patrol” with class two armament—tacheads and punch lasers. That brought up another question.

  “Why the puzzled look, Cadet?”

  “System patrols don’t carry jumpdrives. Non-Imperial jumpships don’t carry weapons. No one knew when we were coming. That means that patroller was on a jump exit course before he knew we were inbound. Either that or he has jumpdrives.”

  “He knew someone was coming. Manual for quarantine actions are no secret. Imperial force has to get to main system planets at max speed. Means clearest corridors. Delay means more to clean up.”

  “They’d try a direct attack against a battlecruiser?”

  “No. They know that some incomers are cruisers. That’s an even match. If they can blow a cruiser or the corvettes, then that buys them time before we can fully cover the system, until our torps reach the fleet commander. We lose ships, that means the captain will have to take more drastic action.”

  Gerswin let Alvera’s comment pass. What drastic action could the captain take, besides destroying the patrollers and whatever other craft the isolated and embattled system government had managed to arm and retain?

  By now his ears were beginning to sort out the verbal messages coming from the comm link of the console, words mixed with static and garbled transmissions.

  “…stand off between Satanists and Brotherhood on Demetros…”

  “…Gabriel to Archangel Michael…successful, divert Gyros…Satanists hold Gyros and Janus…”

  “…norstada cin trahit…Gyros stadit…”

  “…negative diversion this time…negative…”

  “…have no lucifer for Demetros…”

  “…fiela cor Gyros, cor Janus…”

  “…EDI standing wave…heavy battlecruiser…Imperial…presume Imperial presence…”

  “…Gabriel…negative diversion…understand battlecruiser…”

  “…unleash Cherubim on north coast…. North coast…”

  Another green blip pinged into existence in the jump corridor out-system behind the Fordin. That made three out of the four comprising the Imperial quarantine squadron.

  Gerswin studied the representational screen, then the three green dots upon it. Three ships. Just three ships? Where were the corvettes?

  He checked the closure on the Newparran patroller and found that the closure time had dropped to less than thirty minutes.

  “Cadet Gerswin, Chief Alvera, give me a weapons spread proposal for target one.” There was no mistaking the voice of the major.

  Gerswin turned to Alvera and raised his eyebrows. He’d done proposals at the Academy, but was the major serious?

  “Like this, Cadet. Patroller characteristics under subscript…here…armor, screens, power max. Then factor the profile, closure rate, and acceleration…”

  “Acceleration?”

  “Acceleration. Don’t teach that at the Academy. Acceleration takes power. Less power for screens. Too much acceleration and you can’t shift from gravfield to screens without losing control. Some ships have limited shunt capability. Bigger the ship, less shunt capacity. That’s why the battlecruiser is the biggest effective single action ship.”

  Alvera’s fingers danced across his controls, and then touched a stud.

  “Hit accept, Cadet.”

  Gerswin touched the stud, and a duplicate of Alvera’s proposal lined up on his work screen.

  Gerswin studied the recommendation for a moment. Alvera had suggested using six tacheads spaced in a bowl-like pattern, whose detonation would be preceded by a series of quick-spaced bursts from the punch laser. No hellburners, obviously.

  The cadet pulled his lips together as he tried to follow the tech’s reasoning. The actual energy that could be diverted to the laser would scarcely dent a corvette’s screens, let alone the heavier ones carried by a patroller.

  “Understand the tacheads, Chief. Why the laser? Energy level wouldn’t break his screens.”

  “Not the purpose. With his profile against ours, no laser could make a physical impact. The laser bursts are powerful enough to blind him for six-seven seconds. That forces him to move, but he’ll have to move blind, and the tacheads are spaced on the most probable computed evasion tracks.

  “Odds are that no local system government would be able to pull together a complete crew experienced enough to handle the course changes. They’ll have to trust their Al, and that’s what the tacheads are programmed against.”

  Alvera touched the stud to transmit the recommendation.

  “Cadet Gerswin, do you concur with the chief’s recommendation?”

  “That is affirmative, Major.”

  “Chief, what delay factor did you compute for reaction time to the first laser?”

  “One point five standard seconds.”

  “Too quick for a crew that will be shorthanded or inexperienced. Run it at two point five for the inner spread and angle it back to four point five for the outer.”

  Alvera nodded.

  “Will do, Major.”

  Gerswin watched as the chief made his corrections.

  “Looks good, Chief. Set the spread for execution from the command console.”

  “Stet, Major. In the green.”

  The noise level in the already quiet Gunnery operations center dropped further, and the silence, unbroken except for a faint humming, stretched on and on.

  “Ten until contact. Program running.”

  Gerswin looked down, was surprised to find his fists were clenched, and forced himself to relax them. The shipboard version of a fight was so dispassionate, so far removed from the jagged blade and the threat of a king rat or a she-coyote on the prowl. Here, his fate was in the hands of so many others….

  The background scent of fear, faint enough not to reach the awareness of the others, acrid, lingering, began to fill the center. To Gerswin, even the ventilation system seemed to stop, while the air hung heavy over the screens and consoles.

  Cling.

  “Laser punch on. Burst one.”

  The lights in the center dimmed momentarily, flickered, then remained at the lower level.

  “Burst two.”

  On the representational screen, the green blip that was the Fordin spouted a yellow lance that crept toward the Newparran patroller only slightly faster than the Fordin did.

  Gerswin detected the gentlest of shudders in the battle cruiser’s frame.

  “Burst four.”

  “Tachead spread one away.”

  “Burst five.”

  “Spread two away.”

  “Burst six.”

  “Three away.”

  Ding! Ding! Ding!

  “All hands! All hands! Evasive maneuvers! Evasive maneuvers! Remain at stations! Remain at stations!”

  Gerswin glanced over at Alvera, discovered the tech was studying the screen, h
is hands resting on the edge of the console, unmoving.

  “…fiela Gyros…cor Janus…”

  “…Imperial target…heads away…”

  The whispers from the comm monitors took on an added loudness in the comparative silence of the center.

  “…fiela Janus…nir nulla trahit…”

  “Imperial EDIs out-system…”

  “…releasing and commencing beta…evasion…”

  “…diversion when appropriate…when appropriate…”

  The lighting level dropped further, to emergency levels, and the gravfield dropped toward the null point before surging momentarily to almost two gees, then dropping to a stable one gravity.

  Through it all, Gerswin kept his eyes on the representational screen, watching as the simulated punch laser impacted the Newparran patroller’s screen image, and as the images of the tachead bursts began to blossom on the screen, and as the course line of the Fordin veered left, then angled back.

  The red blip that had represented the Newparran patroller flared brightly, then vanished.

  “Target termination complete,” announced the major as the Gunnery lights returned to normal.

  As the former devilkid watched the silent kill of who knew how many men and women, he shook himself, almost like a wet coyote, but he continued to watch the screen. The Fordin’s course line again shifted, this time toward the sixth planet, presumably for the two satellites rather than for the gas giant itself. Better the sixth than the seventh, which was a third of the way around its orbit from the Imperial battlecruiser, reflected Gerswin.

  Since there were no blips, hostile or otherwise, he wondered about the reason for the course switch.

  In the meantime he noted that the fourth green blip, the Krushnei, had appeared on the system farside, out-system from where another Newparran patroller raced toward the Saladin. The Kemal remained out from the Fordin and remained on a more direct in-system course.

  Less than two standard hours since he had come on duty, and the Fordin had been attacked and had destroyed the attacker. After thinking a moment, he corrected himself. The Fordin had simply attacked and destroyed the unnamed Newparran patroller which had tried, unsuccessfully, to stop the Imperial quarantine.