The gray mist swirled away in the small tornado of lifeless sand and hot air that spurted behind the lifting flitter. No sooner had it lifted into the overlying haze than the gray mist oozed back over the sandspit, concealing it from all but the most careful, or well-instrumented, observer.
In the flitter itself, Gerswin touched the course plate, let the course line and map come up on the screen in front of the other.
“You heard of Washton, Lerwin? Washton, stand?”
“Stand.”
“Watch.”
Gerswin triggered the recorded sequence, the tapes and visions he had screened from the Archives, from the old records, scanning the course readouts as he did.
“Opswatch, Prime Outrider. Interrogative met status. Interrogative met status.”
“Prime Outrider, landspout at three four five, thirty kays. Negative on sheer lines. Interrogative fuel status.”
“Ten plus. Ten plus.”
“Understand ten plus. Your course is green.”
“Stet. Prime on course line.”
Lerwin did not comment on the transmission, engrossed as he was in the visions of sweeping green velvet lawns, white structures, and antique vehicles traversing pavements of black and white. And everywhere was sunlight, the glittering golden sunlight no devilkid on Old Earth saw.
Gerswin glanced from the instruments at Lerwin, then back at the course line and through the armaglass of the canopy at the ground fog and the swamp beneath it.
Lerwin did not look up from the glitter and the brilliance of the old records until his small screen blanked.
“Real? Here? People?”
“Not here. Where we’re headed. Washton.”
“Prime Outrider,” the commnet interrupted, “Opswatch. Landspout at three four five. Twenty kays and closing.”
Gerswin switched his attention back to the long view screen, then nodded.
“Opswatch. Interrogative course change.”
“That’s affirmative. Affirmative. Suggest change to zero eight zero for point five. Say again zero eight zero for point five.”
“Changing to zero eight zero for point five.”
“Understand course of zero eight zero for point five.”
“Stet, Opswatch.”
Gerswin leveled the flitter on the more eastern course and checked the projected fuel consumption of the new course line and timing. The change would cost him fuel, but the extra consumption was well within the reserve.
He hoped that convincing Lerwin would do the job. Since Lerwin was the most stubborn of the bunch, if Lerwin could be persuaded to understand the problem, he could reinforce the urgency Gerswin was attempting to instill in the remainder of the devilkids.
Gerswin sighed, and his shoulders slumped momentarily as his eyes flicked across the board before him.
The studied simplicity of the controls and indicators reflected all too well the Imperial design and expenditure, an expenditure level that could and would not be continued once the uniqueness of the great home planet cleanup campaign gave way to some other quixotic quest, once the Imperial Court decided that Old Earth would take forever to fix up.
The contrast between the devilkids and the Imperials…the devilkids were brighter and already had the potential to be far better officers and pilots than all but the very best of the I.S.S. Not that ability meant much in any large organization, but it would take ability to solve the environmental problems of Old Earth, not politics.
Despite the landspouts and sheerwinds, most of the first-stage land mapping of Noram was completed. In real terms, the handful of reclamation dozers had just begun the sifting of soil, gram by gram, to remove and destroy the landpoisons, and the reclamation crops had been harvested twice. Ten thousand square kays so far—it sounded so impressive and was so small.
The task was big, so big, sometimes he wondered about the possibility of anyone ever completing it.
“Dark glooms got you?” asked Lerwin.
“Hell of a contrast,” responded Gerswin, ignoring the thrust of Lerwin’s question. “Old Washton and landdead here. No!”
“Different,” grunted Lerwin. “Old Washton like that? Real like that?”
“Real. Outplanets like that now. You’ll see. Old Earth was greener than all. What we need. What we’ll get.”
Even though he hadn’t looked at the screening Lerwin had just seen since he had canned it weeks earlier, Gerswin could still remember the emerald grass, and the sun, the golden sun that had shone down on everything, on the white marble buildings, the towers, the water that had seemed so blue.
He’d managed to compare some of the vistas in the tapes to the rubble, enough to convince himself that the ruins identified on the maps were indeed the sites on the ancient tapes. For the others, after Lerwin had a chance to spread the word, he had planned a set of comparison tapes, side by sides of the ancient tapes and the present ruins.
“Prime Outrider, this is Opswatch. Cleared to resume direct approach to target.”
“Opswatch, Prime Outrider, steering zero five zero.”
“Understand zero five zero. Zero five zero is green. ETA point eight.”
“ETA at point eight on zero five zero.”
“What did you say?” Lerwin asked after listening to the transmissions and cocking his head in puzzlement.
“You’ll learn. Like a new language. Takes time. Takes practice. Just practice.”
If Lerwin was anything like he’d been, speech was so much slower than thought, particularly when the devilkids had so little use for anything beyond the rudimentary trade talk.
Gerswin kept up his continual scan of the board before him, the screens, and the gray vistas spread out toward the unseen horizon. Gray was the color of the clouds above, the intermittent ground fog beneath, and darker gray the barren hills themselves, with occasional patches of purpled grass, bushes, and an infrequent bent tree.
Contrasting with these omnipresent grays were the bare brown shades of short rocky hilltops or small mountains.
“Deadland,” observed Lerwin.
“Deader here than on the high plains. Landpoison collects on the lower grounds.”
A green dart lit on the homing panel.
Gerswin edged the stick and the flitter leftward and locked in the course change, centered on the beacon he had placed on his surveillance runs.
“Clear look, Lerwin. Clear look. Stand?”
The younger man shifted his weight in the copilot’s seat.
“Clear look, stand,” he agreed, but the tone of his response and his restlessness indicated what Gerswin was afraid might be a lack of comprehension.
The gray-brown hills beneath became less pronounced, but even with the gentler terrain, the deadland grass remained sparse and harder to pick out as the ground fog patches became more frequent.
Every so often, the flitter passed over a darker and shinier gray, with mist rising above it, that denoted water—a slow-flowing river, a dead lake.
“Prime Outrider, this is Opswatch. Interrogative status.”
“Opswatch, Prime Outrider. Status green. Locked on target locator.”
“Understand locked on locator.”
“Affirmative. Affirmative. Will report arrival.”
The pilot shifted his attention from the communications back to the terrain. The first visible signs of what once had been a capitol city were becoming more evident—the white line of cracked and fragmented shards that had been a highway, the all-too-regular mounded humps, and, here and there, the actual stump of brick and steel that remained after the twisting and grinding power of the centuries of landspouts.
The green beacon dart began to pulse on the console.
Gerswin noted the dark steel gray band below the eastern visual horizon. That was the river, and the speckled dark gray and white beyond was the swamp that had been a capitol.
“All those humps—houses. Places to live. Stand?” Gerswin gestured with his right hand briefly, before dropping it back to the thru
ster controls.
Lerwin followed the motion with his eyes.
“People, all?”
“Millions.”
“Deadland now,” concluded Lerwin.
Gerswin gave a small nod of agreement and recentered the course line for the beacon and the white stump of stone where he had placed it. He began to throttle back on the thrusters before deploying the rotors for the slow overflight circles he had planned.
As soon as the airspeed dropped below two hundred kays, he began the deployment sequence. Shortly, the high-pitched whine of the thrusters dropped into a lower key and was supplemented by the thwop-thwop of the blades as the flitter began a slow circle of one island in the swamp.
“Opswatch, this is Prime Outrider. On target. Status green. Estimate time on station at point five. Point five on station.”
“Prime Outrider, understand arrival on station. Time on station point five. Request you report departure. Report departure.”
“Stet. Will report departure.”
To the west was the flat, near-glassy expanse of the river, and to the east, a series of islands of varying sizes, each surmounted with white marble block, some conveying structure, others merely a jumble. Gerswin continued to circle the island closest to the point where the swamp merged with the river, letting Lerwin see it clearly.
From the center of the island the flitter circled, rose the square stump of white marble perhaps sixty meters long. At the sixty meter point the former spire ended, not with a clean cut, but along jagged edges, as if a giant had broken off the top with a single blow. To the northwest, midway between the island and the higher ground that led out of the swamp, was a line of shattered marble, lying barely exposed above the swamp water like a stone quarrel pointing the way to an unknown destination.
Gerswin tapped a stud on the panel.
“Lerwin. Watch the screen. Check the island, then the screen. Stand?”
“What?”
“Watch the screen. Watch outside.”
A scene from the ancient tapes flashed onto the screen in front of the copilot’s seat. On the screen stood a marble obelisk, stretching from emerald grass and stone walks into a clear blue and cloudless sky. The view changed to show the spire from the air, as well as the lower marble buildings at the edge of the rectangular expanse of grass that surrounded the marble spire.
Lerwin’s eyes flitted from the stone stump on the island to the screen and back to the island, and back to the screen.
“No. No…Yes?”
Gerswin banked the flitter out of the circle and headed slowly eastward to the hilltop less than two kays from the ancient monument.
Again, he put the flitter into a circle. The building or buildings beneath had also been white marble. All that remained were white stones streaked with rust and coated with a grayish film. Under the stone jumble, this time Gerswin thought he could detect a squarish pattern of sorts, although when he had first surveyed Washton, he had found it difficult to match the tapes with the devastation that time and the landspouts had wrought.
He tapped the screen controls again, this time to bring another view of the ancient capitol before Lerwin.
“Washton, Lerwin. What was. Now what is. Stand?”
“Was…is? All landdead, swampdead. This was that?”
Gerswin nodded enough for the motion to be clear, still concentrating on trying to keep the flitter close enough to the right angle and altitude for the comparisons to be clear to Lerwin, and to take his own shots of the ruins with the small tapecubes mounted on the port forward stub. The views he had taken this time and the time before would have to do for the others, since trying to convince the commander and Matsuko to allow him such a cross-country jaunt for each of the devilkids wasn’t even an off-nova possibility. Two flights—the recon run and this one—had been justified for research purposes this year. And he couldn’t wait another year.
As he circled, while the devilkid Lerwin looked from screen to ruins to screen, Gerswin scanned from board to horizon to screen to Lerwin to board, trying to gauge the impact on Lerwin.
Lerwin said nothing.
Finally, Gerswin broke off the circle and headed for the religious shrine on the top of one of the higher hills.
There, again, he repeated the process, and through the screen shots and the comparisons, Lerwin said nothing.
“Prime Outrider, this is Opswatch. Recommend departure no later than point two. No later than point two.”
“Opswatch, this is Prime Outrider. Understand departure in point two. Interrogative met status.”
“That’s affirmative. Landspout line developing to the northeast.”
“Interrogative closure.”
“Projected at one five zero kays. One five zero.”
“Stet, Opswatch. Will notify of departure.”
Gerswin scanned his own small weather screen, saw nothing, and switched his attention back to Lerwin.
“Time for one more, Lerwin, before we sprint back home.”
The flitter eased out of the bank and toward the scrubby hills to the southeast of the pile of darkened stones that the map had indicated was once a cathedral.
“Another shrine.”
Gerswin jabbed the screen tapes control to bring up the second shrine. While it had not been so impressive to begin with, the destruction was more clear-cut. The landspouts had scoured everything clean except the foundation outlines and dumped the stone and iron into a twisted heap at the eastern end of the unnaturally flattened hilltop.
Lerwin shook his head through the entire three circuits by the flitter.
“Could show you more, but most places are gone, covered with swamp. Some I couldn’t identify. Sides, don’t want to end up scrapped by the landspouts,” observed the pilot as he began the rotor retraction sequence.
“Opswatch, this is Prime Outrider. Departing target this time. Course two seven five. Two seven five.”
“Prime Outrider, understand two seven five.”
“That’s affirmative.”
The moments in the cockpit dragged on as the whine of the thrusters built along with the airspeed.
Gerswin wondered why he was depressed. He had apparently succeeded in getting his point across to Lerwin. He had been able to get some solid shots of the ruins, which would please Matsuko.
“Prime Outrider, this is Opswatch. Suggest two eight five. Suggest two eight five.”
“Two eight five. Coming to two eight five. Steady on two eight five.”
The flitter rocked, and Gerswin checked the thrusters. Steady and in the green. Course two eight five and five standard hours to go before touchdown.
Another standard hour passed before Lerwin spoke.
“Why?”
Gerswin didn’t answer immediately. What could he say?
How could a people reach the stars, how could they build systems that could still map continents, shelter them under a mountain, and have them operate fifteen to twenty centuries later? How could they build materials that Imperial technology could not understand or duplicate and not stop the devastation of their own planet? How could they forge materials impervious to hellburners and indecipherable to Imperial engineers and have been so unable to stop the collapse?
“Why?” asked Lerwin again.
“Don’t know.” What else could he say? What could anyone have said?
XXXIX
Kiedra studied her reflection in the mirror one last time before glancing down at the single packed kit bag by the bunk. She still wasn’t used to a bunk. Even with the hard panel of composite she’d found to put under the mattress, the Imperial bedding felt too soft.
The plain gray tunic was adequate, certainly better than patched leathers stolen from shambletowners, and although the cloth was soft, it resisted everything but the rain. Nothing resisted the rain. Best were the boots, supple enough to run, but hard enough to shield feet from the shards…
She frowned. Hard to forget that there wouldn’t be any shards where she was headed. No
shards, no landpoisons, no king rats or she-coyotes—just machines and people.
Gerswin had emphasized the people, and the piling of scent upon scent, all muted, as if the people were locked behind windows.
She looked back into the mirror, green cat-eyes facing green cat-eyes, tight-curled black hair facing tight-curled black hair. Gerswin had told her, when she had asked, that she was attractive. But he’d never raised a hand to her, and the other devilkids—the males—were more interested in the Imperial women. The Imperial men…the techs eyed her appreciatively, that she could tell from their breathing and the conversations they thought she had not overheard, but they shied away from her.
The officers were another matter. All were taller than she was, but while they were polite and would help her learn anything, not one ventured even a casual touch.
“Devil-woman…” Kiedra had heard that enough.
She bit her lip. Just because she had objected to being pawed that one time.
Gerswin had not been exactly kind to her when he had arrived on the scene after that incident, although he had certainly been cool enough to Lieutenant Kardias and not at all sympathetic about his broken arm. But then Gerswin had glared at her when no one was looking.
She shivered. There was the real devilkid, with the cold fire in his soul and the weight of the night on his heart.
She sighed, squared her shoulders, and left the kit bag by the bunk. She had more than a standard hour before she had to be at the hangar-bunker for the shuttle to the Churchill.
As she marched toward the captain’s quarters, her quick strides made up for any shortness of leg she might have had.
While the faint trace in the fainter dust outside his portal indicated he was gone, she buzzed anyway. Waited. Buzzed again. And again.
Then she checked the time. Still enough for her to look outside and make it to the shuttle.
Her steps took her to the south lock portals, and she went through the inner and outer ports as quickly as she could. The whistling wind flapped the lower edges of her tunic and tugged at the flat waistband, but the absence of machine oil and musty human stink was a relief. She took a deep breath of the ice cold air, exhaled slowly, and turned her head to search the ridgeline and hillside, while her ears strained.
The Forever Hero Page 18