Hero!

by Dave Duncan

  “Go ahead then, you bastards,” Vaun muttered. He pointed his gun at the control board, and waited.

  And waited…

  WAITING? WAITING IS slow death and worse than death. Waiting is more exquisite torture than any horror in the blood-soaked history of religion or the annals of the Race Wars.

  The cabin is midnight dark, full of mysterious, bulky shapes. Here and there a faint rainbow glow of instruments plays on an ear, a forehead, or a moving hand. Within this crypt, in a huddled circle of hunched ghouls, the crew attend their boards—two girls and four boys all as intent as musicians performing ancient masterpieces. Voices murmur, human and mechanical, small sounds overlain on a deeper hum. Vids flicker.

  Ultian Command’s shuttle Liberty, presently in high orbit…

  Vaun is tormented by overload: crisp-new uniform rustling with every move and pinching his crotch, awesome omens of rank glittering on his shoulders, the smell of metal and recycled air, the vertiginous false gravity, and especially the view he has called up in his tank, a billion stars coruscating in glory.

  This is not a Doggoth simulator. This is real. He rode this bottle through the Hiport launcher, out into the universe.

  Maeve didn’t say good-bye. Wasn’t there to say good-bye. When the rest of the crew were kissing their lovers, he was alone. He’d been told she’d left Hiport. Better not to think about it.

  Somewhere out there is a Q ship—name unknown, crew unknown, inbound from Avalon. The Brotherhood, maybe. He can’t see it, but the vids tell him he should be able to. The boat’s electrocrystalline mind makes no allowance for its commander being a rank beginner.

  He could switch to infrared, of course. Q ships are hot, and he’d pick it up on long-infrared. Somehow that feels like cheating…He continues his search on visual.

  Strangest of all and worst torment of all is the alien sense of authority. He is in charge. Excitement is a throb of pain in his temples, acid coursing his veins, but it is also ice in his gut. Five of those six spacers are genuine. They have spacefarers’ blazes on their lapels and must know ten times as much about all this as he does. They all left Doggoth at least five years ago, before his time, and Ultian Command is large enough that a brand new ensign can posture as a commodore and get away with it as long as he isn’t actually recognized.

  They look to him for orders. They have no inkling that this seemingly routine mission threatens death for all of them, like a wisp of approaching storm cloud bringing winter. They must wonder why an exalted commodore has been assigned command of a lowly pilot boat, and why he is in such a fearsome, bat-fired hurry to make contact, but not one of them has shown any hint of further suspicion. Apparently he is still concealing his ignorance and inexperience, and that is all that is needed. The five trust their lives to his fake insignia; they will obey him without question.

  He mutters a word to his board, demanding more magnification, and is absurdly worried that one of the spacers will hear him. They are all occupied with their own duties and wouldn’t put any significance on the commodore wanting more magnification anyway. They don’t know he can’t find a Q ship in a view tank.

  Still can’t!

  Vaun glances around the darkness and the hints of faces. At the far side of the circle, brightness of two eyes…Yather is watching him. Every pilot boat carries a political officer, of course, but not likely one hailing from the same branch as this one, and normally PolOff has no duties to perform until contact. This poloff is working already. Yather’s job is to keep Vaun in line. The boat’s seating is nonstandard, altered so that he sits directly across from the commander. He may have a gun pointed at Vaun already, a spacer’s low-velocity slug thrower with soft bullets that won’t damage equipment much, or knock holes in a metal hull, but will spread human flesh like a tablecloth.

  He probably has orders to use it before the flight is over, regardless of what happens with the Q ship.

  Waiting. Vaun is ashamed of the tightness in his chest, the dryness of his throat.

  He sneaks another glance across to the far side of the cabin, and again Yather’s eyes shine at him. Still watching. The last five years have been kind to Security Officer Yather, who is now Commodore Yather, but today he wears the humble plumage of PolOff Yather. His career has prospered since he met Vaun. He’s shed a lot of his beef, none of which was ever fat. Either his job no longer includes bullying people or now his rank is high enough that he doesn’t need muscle to show that he’s a big man. He’s still tall, and somehow the size of his bones is more impressive without all the meat cluttering them. He is still swarthy and suspicious. He still glowers darkly.

  Vaun looks away.

  And there is the Q ship in his tank. How could he have missed it earlier? True, it isn’t very impressive, just a smoke-gray, irregular bulk. Rounded, not jagged. It isn’t very big, either—the vids are estimating four kilos max axis, but nothing is going to be very accurate as long as the fireballs are on. It looks like a potato, not an ancient asteroid fragment blasted by the hellfire of space travel. This is a ship—a true star voyager, a rock—and compared to it, this shuttle is a mere toy. The insignificant smudge has raised Vaun’s pulse by thirty points.

  “NavOff!” Vaun barks, making everyone jump, even himself. “How long now?”

  The navigator clears her throat, peering at her board. “About fifty seconds, sir. Assuming they’re going for standard orbit.”

  Sloppy answer…“Why wouldn’t they go for standard orbit?”

  She flinches. “No reason, sir. Forty-four seconds.”

  Vaun drops his eyes back to the tank and the interstellar visitor, edging now into a parking orbit that will be a very fair approximation of what Patrol standing orders call for. Considering that a Q ship travels almost blind, with all its observations screwed up by the singularities, this one is doing very well—certainly better than the legendary Gryphon that tried to orbit City Hall in Kilianville a few centuries ago.

  In less than forty-five seconds the singularities will be turned off and the visitor will then be nothing but a hollow rock, an artificial satellite. Then he’ll find out who or what is aboard, and they will discover him already in place, on the job.

  He toggles for close-up and notices a few tangles of spidery human artifacts, hinting at the complexities of the interior. He can see the singularity if he snaps his tank over to X-ray; then the Q ship blazes at both ends, where the rarefied ions of Ult’s uppermost atmosphere plunge into bottomless nothings and themselves become nothing. The singularities show little on visual, only a faint blurring that he suspects is mostly imagination.

  Infrared shows seven hundred kelvins max…Hot lady! An icy spot around the entry nipple says refrigeration has survived the journey. Turned on already? Makes a boy wonder if Unity maybe expected this extrafast welcome.

  The gravity meters are going nuts.

  NavOff has set up a timer on Vaun’s board. 30…29…Trajectory is getting very close to critical. This feels much less real than a Doggoth simulator. Any minute now Safety will start bleating warnings that he’s put his craft too close to the Q ship’s predicted orbital station—not too close for business eventually, but too close while the fireballs are on. Safety won’t let the pilot boat fall into a singularity, if only because its death scream would be a gamma flux to fry the planet below. The Q ship itself is falling into the pseudo-black hole also, and has been doing so for untold years, but the Q ship has another singularity at the rear to control acceleration. Dangerous things, Q ships. Patrol legends tell of ships falling and wiping out fair-sized nations.

  An amber warning flickers. 15…14…13…Vaun is not going to back off unless he has to. Are the others sweating like him? He glances around, but the only spacer looking his way is Yather. Snake eyes. Still. The light has turned red. Verbal warnings will be next. 10…9…But the Q ship is very close to orbital velocity now. Relax, kid, you’ll make it.

  Inhabitants unknown.

  Presumably human.

 
That is one answer: beasties. The Patrol has a million legends of aliens, although none around Ult. Something unhuman invented the Q drive first; other species roam the spaceways. Elsewhere in the vast Bubble of the Galactic Empire, there must have been contact, but the tales that whisper in over the radio static are distorted and fragmentary. And the worlds of the Silence…Something took them out and cut them off from human ken. Any incoming Q ship is suspect, always.

  The Brotherhood? That is another answer, and the most likely. That is why Vaun is here, to look out for the Brotherhood. And Yather is here to look out for Vaun. And Roker, down below, is watching both of them on his board.

  7…6…5…The pilot boat is accelerating, being sucked into the invisible maw of the singularity.

  The Brotherhood? Or just another nameless load of human wanderers, heading Outward, driven by ancestral urges to try the next valley?

  The lumpy mass is growing larger, nearer, more menacing. As the counter reaches 3, the Q ship turns off its drive. Gravity flux drops to zero. Emergency over. Vaun doesn’t need NavOff’s gleeful exclamation—the vids show a perfect interception ahead. All luck, of course, but a nice feeling. With the fireballs off, all the instruments can register. Radio contact can be established. The visitors ought to be surprised to find the pilot boat already in position. They won’t have time to sneak off any shuttles of their own, which is what Roker wants. Vaun doesn’t think they’ll be surprised.

  Roker is waiting, down there at Hiport, with his finger on the toggle. Q ships are solid nickel-iron, and so close to indestructible that even hardbeams won’t penetrate them far. So Roker’s little missiles are armed with neuron warheads that will short out every organic synapse within ten kilos. The Q ship may use hardbeams.

  Boats like this one are a lot more maneuverable, but also very destructible. Roker promised enough warning.

  Who trusts Roker?

  Radio contact—everyone winces as the cabin is suddenly strident with static and garbled voices. Vaun glances at a nonstandard vid, one that the others’ boards lack. Or so he has been told, but Yather probably has one also. It still glows green…Innocent until proven guilty…

  The voices congeal into one, barely discernible, speaking Galactic with an accent that Doggoth would send to clean latrines. Every planetary command has its own way of pronouncing the ancient tongue.

  The lanky, tow-haired com officer starts chewing a knuckle, worry written all over his peach-smooth face as he listens. He glances up guiltily. “I’m having trouble getting this, sir. Machine translation’ll be along in a moment.”

  The accent is no problem to Vaun. He interprets for ComOff, and also for Roker and the other unseen eavesdroppers—not that any of them are likely to trust his translation.

  “They’re claiming,” he explains, “that they suffered dust damage from cosmic cirrus on three separate occasions, which wiped out their supply of high-gain antennas. They’re also spinning some fine yarns about their cryogenics failing, which explains the lack of sim. And so on. It’s starshit. Suggest some alternative mock-ups and linkages, and tell them that if we don’t get proper responses, we’ll report them as hostile.”

  ComOff gulps and says, “Sir!”

  Then a new voice crackles out loudly, making them all jump. A male voice. “Q ship Unity,” he says. “From Avalon. Do you read us now?’”

  “Yes! We read you now, Unity.” The boy on the com runs hands through his sandy hair and glances across at Vaun with a huge grin of relief. He has been sweating.

  Again the Q ship speaks, “Then don’t jack us around, mate! We’ve been twelve years on this jaunt, and we didn’t expect to make it for the last eight. Half the rotting junk on this hulk’s falling apart on us.”

  That voice! Vaun knows that voice, and the hairs on his neck stir. Have any of the others noticed? If even he can recognize it, then the computers must have made a match…Yes, the secret vid has turned to yellow. That’s a tight-beam code from Roker. Yellow means Suspicious: further data required.

  Suspicious, hell! Maybe Roker needs more evidence to justify destroying both a Q ship and a boatload of his own spacers, but Vaun has all the evidence he wants. The Brotherhood is on that ship.

  Visual! Ult must see that speaker’s face. That will do it. Then the vid will turn purple, meaning Get the hell out of the way! Fast.

  “Get a visual, ComOff!” Vaun snaps, but he knows that there isn’t going to be a visual. The Brotherhood is not so stupid. The sandy-haired boy speaks into a mike, and jiggles the toggles with his fingers at the same time.

  The Q ship voice becomes garbled again.

  Vaun looks at Yather’s sour stare and sees no help there. There’ll certainly be no help from Roker, who daren’t send up more than that tight-beam code. Avalonian technology is superior.

  The comoff boy is at his wits’ end, and Vaun can sense the others’ growing unease. They’re all waiting for instructions. He’s going to have to make a command decision quickly, because without a course correction they will drift past contact.

  If he makes the wrong decision, Yather will shoot to kill.

  If he alerts the brethren, then Roker will.

  If the brethren suspect what’s happening, then they will.

  Oh well, he’s made no plans for the afternoon.

  And suddenly there is a visual, a girl’s face peering out of the snowstorm in the tanks. A girl?

  “Hello Liberty!” she says. “Do you read me?”

  She is speaking Andilian, one of the principal languages of Avalon. Almost no one on Ult can speak or understand Andilian.

  Prior knew it, though. And Vaun does. The hairs on the back of his neck prickle again, and his scrotum clenches. Yather is showing his teeth, waiting for Vaun to utter just one single word of warning.

  “Calling pilot boat,” the girl says, her voice crackling with static. “Do you read me?”

  “She’s a sweetie, isn’t she?” MedOff inutters.

  Is she, though? The image…the voice? With reception so poor they could easily be fakes, sims made by computer. Again Vaun looks to Roker’s signal, and it is still yellow—so Hiport isn’t convinced by that female image either.

  The Brotherhood…If the Brotherhood is running that ship…The Brotherhood wants to know if Prior is aboard.

  Vaun glances at Yather and gets a grudging nod.

  “I’ll take it, ComOff,” he says in his unfamiliar commander’s tone. He thumbs a toggle. The girl shows no reaction, but the readings say that his image is going out. He turns his head momentarily, as if checking something on a side display; in reality he is letting them see his profile. The static and jabbering fall off sharply.

  He looks squarely back at the com and speaks Galactic. Conscious of Yather’s jumpy trigger finger, he pronounces it Doggoth-style and a lot slower than he needs to. “Hailing Unity. This is Ult Command shuttle Liberty, Commodore Prior, commanding. Identify yourself, speaker.”

  Silence…

  Contact is coming up. Downstairs, Roker is also waiting, with a finger on a trigger. Silence…Are the brethren waiting for Vaun to give a password? Or have they already guessed that he is not Prior, as he claims? Are their fingers reaching for triggers also?

  Waiting…

  EVEN IN AN age when half the equipment on the planet seemed to be failing from lack of competent maintenance or lack of the correct resources or sheer antiquity…even then, the Patrol’s K47 torch buggies were so universally reliable that they carried only the simplest of emergency gear. Whichever previous owner had hot-rodded Vaun’s unit had stripped out most of that and left nothing but a simple buzz cushion and a primitive cartridge to blow it clear. Why bother? Nothing ever went wrong with a Star-seat.

  Unless some maniac gave the control board a bad case of meltdown, of course…

  Vaun spat into the howling ice of the wind, and coughed again. He thought he had been unconscious, briefly, but he was flying the cushion, so he must be still alive. Fortunate that sky buzzing was one o
f his favorite pastimes at Valhal—his reflexes were in good shape. There was a salty taste of blood in his mouth, and a red filter blurring his right eye. He felt as if he’d fallen about ten stories onto a concrete sidewalk, facedown. Ejection at that altitude and velocity was classified by the manual as “last resort.”

  The world spun crazily far below him, and he fought back with muscles already numbed by cold. He dimly recalled seeing his torch dissolve in a flower of red fire that dropped smoky roots earthward. That might have been one of Tham’s missiles, or merely the self-destruct.

  His left eye wasn’t much more use than the right, but through the tears he identified the familiar hills around Tham’s compound, and the lake, far below him still. He twisted the cushion and angled his dive that way.

  They hadn’t shot him down, at least, and they could have beamed him easily already, so probably they weren’t going to. Krantz! but it was cold. He was a human icicle. He hoped nothing would freeze and break off before he landed.

  Dawn flamed glorious along the peaks to the east. Good to be alive.

  COZILY NESTLED IN a wooded valley, Forhil’s steeply pitched roofs and sheer timber walls suggested one of the Early Gilbian reconstructions favored by asteroid brokers and armament tycoons; but Forhil was genuinely old, parts of it dating from before the Stravakian Revolution. It sprawled haphazardly, confessing to centuries of indecision, yet that very vagueness—plus a mangy coat of velvety moss on all the buildings—gave it real character. It seemed almost part of the hills themselves, something that mankind could borrow and use, but had never created. In fact, in its youth there had been a substantial city here. The surrounding forest was pocked and knobbed with masonry and old cellars.

  Forhil had belonged to the Patrol for several centuries, and was a traditional perquisite of the ComCom; which was likely why Tham had hung onto the post. Vaun ranked it third or fourth behind Valhal as a fitting home for a hero.

  He was aware that he must be a sight as he limped across the lawn, heading for the front door. His eye had cleared, but there must be blood and bruises all over his face, and he was still coughing blood. He had ripped his shirt and some skin in a fornicating crimple bush as he landed, and twisted a knee. But at least he’d landed in one piece, and nothing seemed to have fallen off yet.