The Forever Hero (16 page)

Gerswin scanned the screen, studying the eight figures, all stretched on the flextile flooring. The cots were empty.

Five young men, three women—the results of six months of preparation and two weeks of leave—waited like the caged animals they resembled.

“Eight, Captain? Just eight who meet the minimums?”

“That's an estimate, Harl. Just an estimate.”

Eight, thought Gerswin. Were eight all there were, or all he and
Imperial technology could find and drag from the ruins of the planet?

He took a deep breath.

“Hold these, Harl.”

He handed the weapons belt to the technician and palmed the portal release.

“Ser! Clerris and N'gere are still recovering.”

“I know. That's why this is my job.”

He eased inside the portal, waiting until it was securely closed behind him before moving farther into the converted dormitory.

Quiet as he had been, the two figures closest to the portal rolled out of sleep and into a crouch.

The first one to his feet was dark-eyed, with the shining depth of cat-eyes, dark-haired, and wore the tattered, raw, and uneven leathers and fur of the plains coyote. He was bareheaded and barefoot.

The second slid to her feet with more grace, but just as swiftly. Instead of leathers, she wore the discarded sack trousers and jacket of a shambletowner. Green eyes burned under the short-hacked thatch of black hair.

Gerswin stood there, barehanded, balanced, waiting for the attack he knew would come.

The boy launched himself—a dark streak half invisible in the darkened room.

With even greater speed, Gerswin stepped aside, letting his arms strike so swiftly that they never seemed to have moved from their half-raised position in front of him.

Thud
.

The fall of the crumpled figure that had been Gerswin's attacker shook the flextile floor.

The girl pretended to look down and turn away, scuffed one bare foot on the smooth surface underfoot, then the other. A third scuff, and a fourth, followed, each one narrowing the distance between her and the I.S.S. officer, each one alerting the six others in the dormitory.

Gerswin smiled, flicked his eyes to the still-slumped figure in the corner and back to the girl.

“You lose, devilkid,” he observed.

“No!”

Again…Gerswin faced a dark streak, so quick that the men watching through the screens could not see what happened, only that the results were the same.

Two figures lay beside each other in the corner to Gerswin's left, both breathing, both stunned.

The six others attacked—roughly together. Seven bodies merged and blurred, the motions so fast that the Service observers and outside sentries did not move, uncertain what to do next.

Before they could decide, the chaos sorted itself out, with bodies falling and being thrown aside, until a single figure stood alone.

Gerswin shuddered, took a deep breath, and wiped the blood off his forehead with the back of his right hand. His ribs ached again, and crisscrossing his forearms were a net of gouges. The blood continued to ooze from his forehead.

He took three steps to his left and yanked the boy, his first attacker, into the air.

The youngster's eyes blazed, but he did not strike.

“Devilkid you. Devilkid me.” Gerswin pinned the boy with his eyes as he spoke, although his attention was also on the seven others. “I talk. You follow. Stand? Stand clear?”

He set the boy on his feet and turned away, toward the girl, listening for the possible signs of another attack.

The whisper of a foot was enough.

Like lightning, Gerswin whirled and struck, ducking under the streak of the other, planting a stiffened palm under the youth's sternum, followed by an elbow across the jaw, and a sweep kick to leave an even more crumpled heap of devilkid.

“Devilkids you. All devilkids. Head devilkid—me! I talk. You follow. Stand? Stand clear?”

He grabbed the girl who had attacked second.

“You stand?”

“Stand.”

Less than five standard minutes later, he stood in front of the eight—all eight—his back again to the portal, the blood still dripping from his forehead.

“Teach you talk good. Teach you clean good. Teach you learn good. Stand?”

“Teach us fight good?”

“Learn good first. Then fight. Stand?”

“Stand.”

Gerswin went down the line, repeating the process with each one, forcing a commitment and a personal loyalty, which was all that could bind them now.

“Be back. You wait. No fight.”

Not one moved as he turned his back and walked out through the portal. Once he was gone, the eight approached each other warily.

Outside, the two techs, the two sentries, and the sergeant of the guard stepped back as Gerswin moved away from the portal.

“Long flight ahead, Harl.” There was a twist to his lips as he said it. “Long flight.”

“Yes, ser.”

“I'll be at the flight surgeon's, then over with Major Matsuko and the commander.”

“Yes, ser.”

“Don't go in there. Not one of you. You wouldn't last a minute.”

“Yes, ser.”

His quick steps echoed on the tile, then faded as he entered the tunnel.

Finally, Harl cleared his throat.

“Eight of them…like him?”

“He's better.”

“Fine. Eight of them half as good as him?”

The guard sergeant shook his head slowly. “They kept saying he was as good as a Corpus killer. They were wrong. He's better, lots better. Lots better.”

Harl looked at the corridor down which the captain had disappeared. “Who would believe it?”

“That's a weapon, too.”

Harl screwed up his face as he wrestled with another question.

“Why does he want them?”

“Why did the commander let him round them up?”

Harl frowned, then relaxed.

“He has a reason for everything. He always does.”

The flitter touched down on the flat expanse of sand protruding from the purple-gray waters. The whine of the thrusters faded and was followed by a
click
as the canopy slid back.

Two figures in coveralls emerged and dropped to the grayish sand, their knees and black flight boots vanishing in the mist that drifted above the waters and over the sandspit.

With the dampness and the chill, with the gray mist and purpled water rippling solely from the tidal pressures beyond the delta, came the odor of death. Not the hot odor of death in the arena, nor the odor of hot metal and oiled death, nor the decay of swamps, nor even the moldiness of an ill-tended graveyard, but the metallic residue of death so long embalmed that only the inorganic heavy metals remain, those and the faintest whiff of past life.

Gerswin turned to his left, toward a black shimmering stump with a single limb that rose three meters from the purple waters.

“Maps say this was a heavily forested delta two thousand years back. Another century and it will be gone.”

“Just kill-water,” answered the other. “Why show me? Kill-water is kill-water.”

Gerswin shook his head, jabbed his left hand at the stump.

“Didn't have to be. Doesn't have to be. We can change it. You can change it.”

“Kill-water is kill-water.”

The pilot snapped his head up in a single fluid motion to let both visors retract into the helmet housing. His hawk-yellow eyes caught the youth, slightly built like Gerswin himself, but with a fringe of dark hair showing beneath the back of his helmet.

“I'm the captain, Lerwin. Captain. Life-water is what we need, and you're going to New Augusta and Alphane and New Colora. You're going, and you're coming back. Life-water. That's the reason. You forget, and I'll chase you to the corners of the universe. Stand?”

“Stand.”

Gerswin did not contest the sullenness of the response, instead motioned to the flitter.

The two figures climbed the recessed hand- and toeholds of the military craft and settled back into the cockpit. Within moments, the whine of the thrusters broke the stillness of mist and silent water, and the
click
of the closing canopy was lost in the power of the engines.

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 of
ficers 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 thruster 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.