A Hero By Any Other Name

by Stackpole, Michael A.

  To reveal a wall of flame...

  In spite of the fact we saw nothing but fire and smoke at first, in spite of how heat rolled in to engulf us, the fire wasn’t that close. I could see a stretch of maybe fifty yards of calf-height grass, yellow and summer-parched, between us and the burning treeline. But the fire itself, a wall of oranges and yellows and dark haze, the trees within it almost seeming to writhe as they died, was as spooky as hell. All the hair on Conrad’s body rose—suddenly he was twice as voluminous as before.

  Me, I didn’t have any hair to stand up, not one follicle. I resisted the urge to slap my visor closed. The heat couldn’t hurt me, but childhood instincts, such as the desire to retreat from hot stuff, died hard. I trotted down the ramp and looked around.

  To my left, westward since the morning sun hung high off to my right, was the little wine-making town of Dalton Valley, population 138. The small collection of white, yellow, and brown prefabs clustered around the three-story limestone-faced city government building. My joke about cults and charismatic leaders had been off-base; no wall circled the town. Instead, the settlement was surrounded by a yellowing grass beltway fifty to a hundred yards wide, which was where we’d set down. The beltway was in turn rimmed by burning forest north, west, and south.

  Eastward, the terrain became more rolling. It was thickly covered with grapethorn hedges, some of them waist-high and some taller than Conrad. Fire had also engulfed the hedges. I saw grape-picker robots, silver and boxy atop four spidery legs, standing or lying inert just on this side of the fire, and could glimpse more within the wall of flame. That was wrong; there was no reason the picker-bots should have been non-functional.

  In the distance east and west, the terrain rose gradually, and beyond a few miles those far slopes did not seem to be on fire. The settlement of Dalton Valley was imaginatively named after the geographical feature where it was located, a valley watered by the Dalton River. Smoke and haze to the north were too thick for me to see the distant mountains where the river originated.

  I looked around, suddenly bewildered. Where the hell was the Dalton River?

  Sure, the map in my briefing file had made it clear that it was a “river” by the same rules we observed in Chihuahua and Texas—if it ran year-round and took more than one step to cross, it was a river. In better-irrigated places, it would be called a creek. So the Dalton River wouldn’t be a broad expanse with barges on it, but even in the heat shimmer, even with smoke clouds being driven toward us from the south by the summer winds, I should have been able to see glinting water.

  Then I spotted it off to my left, on the other side of the flatblimp: a dry creek bed. I trotted toward it. Even with my quarter-ton pack on, putting my curb weight at around eight hundred pounds, I didn’t sink much into the hard, dry ground.

  Standing at the creek bank, I could see that the Dalton River wasn’t completely dry. There had been water in it only a few hours before, leaving a muddy channel and some shallow pools behind.

  Conrad and Hathor joined me, and the flatblimp went airborne again. The engine roar faded and the forest fire roar rolled in to take its place. I heard distant popping, like rapid small-caliber handgun fire, as tapnut clusters cooked off among the trees.

  Conrad looked at the nearly dry waterway and frowned. “That’s not a seasonal change.”

  I shook my head. My helmet didn’t twist, of course; it was locked in place. “Maybe it got dammed up.”

  Hathor looked around. Her voice sounded subdued. “It’s a lot like my property over near Firstfall. Mostly woods and grapethorns. Very pretty...”

  “When it’s not on fire.” I glanced at Conrad. He was still puffed up like a bottle brush. “You going to be okay?”

  “I’m holding it together.” He brushed at the hair on his head and shoulders, trying to smooth it down, a futile effort. “I get a lot of sight and smell stimulus that normal people don’t. I will admit I’m a little... unsettled.”

  I gave the town another look. I saw not one human being. Doors were closed, but windows on buildings with air-conditioning units were open. There was no sign of violence, and the fire was not yet at the outermost streets.

  Where the hell was everybody?

  Two

  The settlement was made up of sensible little structures reminding me of double-wide mobile homes and Quonset huts. My hastily-assembled, mostly-from-public-documents briefing file had said the community had been established only ten years earlier. Hard-baked enamel colors, not yet beginning to flake or peel from any of the buildings, confirmed that the town was comparatively young.

  We trotted among those buildings, shouting for the settlers. I hated shouting in environments I didn’t completely understand. It made me feel like I had a target painted on my chest.

  No one came out of the buildings. Conrad loped off to do a house-to-house search and sniff. Hathor remained near me, her head up, turning this way and that as if trying to hear some faint, distant sound.

  And all the while I could hear the low, rumbling roar of the fire. I could smell the smoke the winds brought to us. Moving among the buildings, I could occasionally see down a street all the way to the fiery treeline to the south, see the flames creeping across the grass beltway toward us. Sparks and embers, carried by that wind, moved out in advance of the ground fire like scouts for an invading army.

  I gave Hathor a look.

  She returned it, shaking her head. “I can’t feel any people. Except us.”

  I unbuckled and shrugged out of my pack. I set it down on the gravel road. “What’s your range?” From the pocket in the top flap, I pulled out the data tablet.

  “A few hundred yards. But running water and large volumes of water give me a lot of interference.”

  “That’s a new one on me.”

  “My aunt was the same way. She could find anything lost, anywhere in town, but only if there was no running water between her and it.”

  With a few finger touches and swipes I brought up the town schematics the RTRDS people had loaded onto the tablet. “There’s a crisis shelter under the town hall. Would concrete or bedrock block your ability to detect people in it?”

  She shook her head again, then looked thoughtful. “Not unless its water tanks were at the top. Then, yeah, maybe.”

  I stuffed the tablet back in its pocket and donned the pack again. “Let’s find that shelter.”

  She fell in step beside me. “I’ve never done an operation like this before. Why did they send us? Why not drop in a big cargo flatblimp to evacuate the settlers?”

  “Resources. The fire’s huge, threatening a bunch of towns, many of them bigger than Dalton Valley. The big flatblimps are evacuating other settlements or dropping water on hot spots. The government will send one here when we signal that the townfolk are ready to be lifted, but not before. And with no one in Dalton Valley responding to radio or microwave communications, the authorities didn’t know if they’d be sending rescuers into a situation they didn’t understand.” I took another look around. “Hell, I’m immune to bullets, and I’m spooked right now.”

  Conrad came running back as we got to within a block of the limestone building. His ears were down, a very dog-like expression of unhappiness. He fell in beside us. “There’s electronic charring in all the buildings.”

  I gave him a sharp look. “Be more specific.”

  “Circuits fried and melted. Delicate electrical wires burned through, even inside insulation. Burned from the inside. Hardier wiring, like industrial-quality power cabling, was damaged but survived. I think ... electromagnetic pulse.” He glanced skyward as if expecting a high-atmosphere nuclear blast to manifest.

  I wasn’t worried about being nuked, but Conrad’s words had just taken this situation from “mystery” to “mystery plus enemy action.”

  Hathor gave Conrad a little shake of her head. “It won’t have been anything like a bomb, nothing that big. There are small emp-bombs. And directional emp-guns. It would have been something lik
e that.”

  I nodded. “I’m guessing a broad beam fired from overhead, straight down. That would be less likely to register with satellite sensors or the lightning-tracking gear over in Firstfall. This explains all the ruined grape-picker robots, too.” The tactical part of my mind was fully engaged now, calculating the personnel, the money required to achieve what had been done in Dalton Valley. Weird how instantly you fall back into the super-arena mindset, even after being away from it for decades.

  Hathor glanced at me but spoke to Conrad again. “What about photo albums, photo printouts? And pets?”

  He turned his attention on her. “Eh?”

  “People who are evacuating take their photo albums, small trophies, awards—evidence of family and achievement. And they take their pets. People being kidnapped en masse don’t.”

  Something about her statement tugged at me. There was a circumstance where what she said was not true. I had a dim memory of hearing about that when I was a kid. But here in Dalton Valley I couldn’t remember what that circumstance was.

  “Oh.” Conrad frowned, thinking about it. “I didn’t know, so I wasn’t looking for that sort of thing. But there are no pets around. There have been pets, but they’re all gone.”

  “Evacuated, then.” But Hathor didn’t sound confident. “Evacuated and vanished.”

  The big double doors on the limestone building, its main entrance, were closed but unlocked. Conrad became very focused once we stood before them; he sniffed the tan-colored metal doors, then trotted around on the concrete walkway and steps before them, bending almost double, always sniffing, before straightening up and returning to me and Hathor. “Something was taped onto the door. Paper, held on with masking tape. A few hours ago. The paper was removed. I think there were a lot of people here, too. Maybe they used this building as a muster point.”

  But he couldn’t offer more than that, and Hathor’s psychometry gave us nothing; she touched the doors, the handrails leading up the exterior steps, and shook her head. So we entered the building.

  It took us maybe a minute to find our way along the somber, wood-paneled halls and stairs into the basement room with the floor access into the crisis shelter. The access was a metal ring, kind of like you’d find on a submarine, for dogging and undogging, mounted on a round hatch of tempered steel about a yard in diameter, the hatch imbedded in the concrete floor. A heavy-duty mechanical numeric keypad inset in the hatch itself served as a means to unlock the thing from the outside even when the building lost power.

  I tried the ring. It turned maybe an inch before seizing up. That was a good sign; maybe someone was inside. I pounded on it for a minute, but there was no answer from below.

  I looked at the others. “Either of you good with this kind of security?”

  They shook their heads. Hathor added, “I’m not picking up anyone. But, like I said, maybe water tanks ...”

  “Right.”

  Conrad’s muzzle creased as he sniffed. “Other than us, I smell a total of three or four people. Not especially recent. But I could be missing something. The smoke obscures a lot.”

  I sighed. “Time to try the strongman thing, then. You two might want to stand on the other side of the doorway.”

  They did, letting the doorjamb shield all but their faces as they watched, Conrad on the left and Hathor right, leaving me alone in the gray basement room.

  I didn’t bother trying to force the ring or the hatch. They weren’t the weakest components of this entryway. Instead, I took off my gloves and dug my fingers into the concrete around the hatch itself, trying to get a grip under the metal.

  Understand, I wasn’t the man I had been a quarter-century before. When I was in my twenties, I could have sheared through a century-old oak with a swing of my arm or yanked a hatch like this out of a concrete floor using only two fingers. Since recovering from a really bad illness, though, I’d been weaker. Picking up a good-sized car wasn’t a strain, but an armored personnel carrier was outside the limits of my strength.

  But the concrete, civilian grade, gave way under my fingers. I scraped enough away that I could get a grip on the metal frame beneath. Then I tried to straighten up.

  For long moments, nothing happened. Then the metal in my grip shifted just a little—and suddenly I was standing straight up, inadvertently flinging a half ton of metal into the ceiling. It hit and dropped straight toward my head.

  Then it sort of went sideways and hit the concrete floor a yard away with the mother of all clang noises.

  I glanced at the doorway. Conrad was already through, kneeling to sniff at the dark, roughly circular hole I’d made in the floor. Hathor was just entering the room. Walking around in her heavy fire suit hadn’t really caused her to perspire, but now a trickle of sweat ran down the side of her face.

  I gestured at the hatch. “Did you deflect that?”

  She nodded. “Telekinesis is your friend.” She wiped at the rivulet of sweat, to little effect; our gloves weren’t at all absorbent. “I’m better channeling gases and liquids than handling heavy solids, though.”

  “Well, my helmet thanks you.”

  Hathor and I joined Conrad. The hole was just a black circle with a metal ladder leading down into eerie silence. Conrad called “Hello?” a couple of times, then slid down the ladder and disappeared from sight.

  Hathor straightened up and caught my eye. “You’re very calm.”

  “Wily old veteran at work.”

  “I mean ... you’re not really concerned about the settlers.”

  “Of course I am. I’m here to help, aren’t I?”

  “Being willing to help isn’t the same as being worried. You’re not worried about them. Does that mean you somehow know they’re safe? Or do you not care?”

  I gave her a frown. “It’s better to think tactically until the problem is solved. Then you can let your emotions party like spring break.”

  “If you say so.”

  “What about you—why’d you give up your costumed career? Did you go the family-and-kids route, or are you another psychic burnout case?” Okay, maybe my question was deliberately provocative. But her comment about my not caring had stung. Maybe I wanted to sting back.

  Her face offered no evidence that my words had struck home, though. She just looked thoughtful. “No family. No kids. So, burnout, I guess. With powers like mine, if you’re surrounded by too many people for too long, it’s like drowning. You lose all sense of who you are.”

  “I thought there were drugs you could take to make that more tolerable.”

  “There are. And your powers don’t work as well. If you’re determined to figure out where a kidnapped teenager has been buried alive, you want your powers functioning perfectly. If you’re going to face off against guys with laser autocannons, you want to do it with more than a good alto singing voice.”

  “So you drown.”

  “Yeah.”

  “And now you’re back at it. You’re going to drown again.”

  She shook her head. “I only sing in the studio now. No crowds full of people with their intense expectations. And I’m not living in an Atlanta condo surrounded by city or in hotels. I can go home to a hundred and sixty acres of plant life. Plus I’m older and wiser. I’ll be fine.”

  “If you say so.”

  Conrad returned empty-handed. There was no one in the shelter.

  The fire encroaching from the south had reached that edge of town by the time we emerged from the town hall. Conrad ran off to do a final sweep of the area.

  I tried to reconstruct the events that had taken place before our arrival in town. “I’m guessing things got started last night. The instigators—Mister Big, whoever he is, or Miss Big, and minions—dammed the creek upstream. Reason unknown. Maybe hours before dawn. It would have taken quite a while to run dry. Then, maybe at dawn—the last computerized status check from town came about then—they set fire to the forest in a ring around town and hit the area with electromagnetic pulses. Probably one bi
g single pulse.”

  Hathor shrugged. “To cut them off from the outside world. But why?”

  “Unknown ... They set fire to a lot of forest, all over the valley and beyond. Everything dry from summer went up like tinder. Assuming no other communities have had their whole populations go missing, those other fires would have been distraction—keeping official resources elsewhere while Mister Big did... whatever... to the settlers here.”

  “And then... what?” Hathor looked around as if some clue, unnoticed before now, would leap up and wave its arms at her. “Were they airlifted out?”

  “Maybe. No, that can’t be right. If they had a radar-invisible extraction vehicle, they wouldn’t need the kind of head start all the fires have given them. They’d just hit the town with the electromagnetic pulse, show up with a lot of guns, and say ‘Get aboard.’” I sighed. “Why couldn’t we have gotten a stupid, melodramatic mastermind, the kind who’d just leave a note? ‘I’m doing all this ... to avenge Debbie.’ No, we have to land in a mystery, and it’s pissing me off.”

  “Don’t make a joke of this.” For the first time, her voice actually turned sharp. “More than a hundred people might be out there dying. Might already be dead.”

  “Whatever you say.”

  It wasn’t really the mystery pissing me off. It was the fact that the mystery was starting to feel familiar. An entire small-town population abducted or driven off. Why? And where had I heard about that before?

  Conrad came back holding a doll. “Found it in the grass on the north side, near the creek bed, not far from the fire. A lot of footprints headed into the forest there. People, even dogs. Hours ago. The footprints had been pressed into grass when it was still wet with dew. Obviously, the north treeline wasn’t on fire then.”

  I gave the doll a look. It was a little girl’s play-doll, a stylized toddler made of cloth and rubbery plastic, maybe eighteen inches tall. The doll wore a dress, a traditional Mexican folk-dancing dress, the skirt made up of alternating horizontal bands in tan, orange, and brown. The doll had ruddy south-of-the-border skin like mine. It hung in Conrad’s big, hairy hand, limp like it was a dead girl lying in the streets.