The Forever Hero (2 page)

Fssst!

Another wall torch flared into flame. Then a third, and a fourth.

The devilkid ground his teeth against the pain from his leg and scrambled up the Maze toward his escape hole, forcing himself to make sure the handholds were firm before trusting his weight on them.

Crack!

A slingstone plowed into the rubble next to him, shattering a brick. The chips stung his uncovered right shoulder.

He forced himself upward toward the narrow hole that he knew the large shambletowners could not and would not fit into.

Crack!

Another slingstone shattered under his feet.

He could see the hole just above him, could scent the odors he recalled from his entry and squirmed the last body length to it.

Crunch!

“
Ooooo!
” The involuntary exclamation was forced from him, expelled by the force of the slingstone that had hit his side as he had twisted inside the dark passage.

“Got devulkid, Fynian!”

Now it hurt not only to use his left leg, but his left side was bruised.

He slid farther down the winding way and behind an ancient beam to catch his breath.

While an occasional slingstone rattled part way down the hole, he could tell from the outside sounds that the shambletowners were not about to chase him tonight, not with the still-freezing rain, and not into the higher Maze holes. Not his time.

He rested. But before long, he began to pick his way back out of the Maze. He had to be clear of the shambletown, well clear, before the lightness of dawn.

Fynian, the broad man, he would remember.

Screens. Screens and their images were what dominated the bridge. Every console on the
Torquina
's bridge had at least three, and each was tied to an accompanying seat that doubled as an accel/decel couch, despite the fact that such usage had never been required.

The main screen displayed the image of a planet, a planet swathed mainly in clouds, except for occasional clear spots over the oceans. The
Torquina
swung in an almost geocentric orbit to allow the sensors and data relays from the exploratory torps maximum analytical time.

Some of the officers and techs watched. Some paid no attention. Some looked periodically.

The data flow centered on a single console with but four screens, in the innermost corner of the bridge. Had the captain wanted, he could have duplicated or monitored the flow. He did not so choose.

The Imperial Interstellar Survey Service officer facing the console continued to juggle the inputs, often manipulating two screens simultaneously.

“What does it look like?” asked the engineering officer who stood behind her.

“Worse than you can imagine. Worse than I'd believe. Some are still alive. Don't see how.”

“How can you tell?”

“Patterns. Patterns. Look.” She pointed to the top screen in front of her. “See the square here? That's built on top of the ruins. Then there's the background heat. Wouldn't be there if it were deserted.”

She shook her head, and her short red hair fluffed out above the silver and black of her watch uniform.

“Background contamination is high.”

“How high, Lieutenant Marso?” asked the captain from the command console across the bridge.

“Until we get the sampling data back, Captain, I can't provide figures. There are areas of widespread erosion and a total lack of vegetation in places where by all rights there should be trees, or at least grass, especially by some of the streams and rivers. First class ecological disaster, ser.”

“We knew that,” commented the engineering officer. “We knew that before we came.”

Lieutenant Marso ignored the comment, not even turning her head in his direction.

“Any hopeful signs?” pursued the captain.

“Some. Some areas of habitation. Mainly in the high plains areas and places where there is drainage. Sedimentation areas look the deadest. I can't tell about the oceans, although they should have been affected last and should have been the first to recover.”

“Place will never recover. Like Marduk,” observed the chief engineer.

“It's not like Marduk. Nothing at all lives there. Here you can see some recovery.”

“A few savages, a few thousand square kays where they can eke out a minimal survival. That's recovery?”

The ecologist bit her lip and shifted the image from screen three to screen four, bumped four into memory store, and took the latest torp data on screen three.

As the temperature data began to register, she frowned, then checked the parameters again.

“Trouble, Lieutenant Marso?”

“Not exactly, Captain. But it's cold, a great deal cooler than the old records would indicate. The ice caps are larger, and the high plains temperature, where it should be midsummer local, shows a high of less than ten degrees Celsius. Even taking into account unusual variations, that's more than twenty degrees below either the old records or our modified projections.”

“Recovery!” snorted the chief engineer under his breath as he clumped from the bridge back to his own control center. “Recovery indeed.”

Lieutenant Marso's fingers continued to flicker over the console controls as the data in her files built, as the ship's torps continued their transmissions, and as the purple landspouts traversed the continent beneath.

The captain waited, and the
Torquina
crept along her surveillance orbit.

First, to the south of the small wilds and east of the Maze was the shambletown square, purple-gray clay hard-packed over the jagged rubble of the buried city. Around the square was the shambletown itself, a mass of old stone and clay brick structures threaded with winding ways. Last, around the shambletown were the walls of clay brick painted rough-smooth with sandpaint and backed with walkways for the handful of guards.

East of the shambletown was the Maze, that jumble of toppled buildings of the ancients that crowned the long ridge top, and to the west, below the space cleared by the shambletowners, rising from scattered grubushes, was a marble hulk, once domed, that had been a capitol.

As for the Maze…

The boy darted from it, from grubush to grubush beneath the
northern edge of the smooth shambletown wall, until, at last, he could see the cracked and tumbled walls of the old structure.

He rested more weight on his left leg than his right, and when he walked, he limped. The limp was less pronounced when he ran. Even in the dark his blond hair glinted, as if with a light of its own, to match the hawkish brown-flecked yellow of his ever-searing eyes, eyes that also seemed to glow in the darkness.

“Hsssst…”

His eyes tracked the sound, his body turning. As he saw the plume of dust rising on the downslope to his right, he checked the wind direction, then relaxed.

The breeze was still blowing toward the mountains and would carry the chokeplume down into the clay-filled rubble that spread across the valley.

The area had been spared the worst of the landspouts and the concentration of landpoisons had kept the scavenging down, but little enough was left of the old city, little enough that few would even have recognized the desolation for what it had been.

The blond boy let his eyes trace the faint outline of what others could not see at all in the night, from the jagged and sand-scoured peaks of the west to the flattened hills to the north and the rolling plains to the east. The ground fog was building in the depressions, gathering its own poisons as they sifted from the poisoned ground, and though the swirls caused by the joining of mountain and plains winds could not be seen, the boy could sense them, as he always had.

“Fssst!”

A new torch flared on the shambletown wall.

“Devulkid!”

“Where devulkid?”

The jumble of voices registered in his ears, echoing and rumbling off the rubble of the Maze, off the rough-smoothed walls of the shambletown. To both the north and the south, the Maze dwindled into low mounds, sometimes little more than humps of clay and sand and brick. From the larger mounds protruded here and there rusted or black metal beams twisted into shapes never designed by their makers.

The thin and golden-haired boy darted a look back over his shoulder, as a gate began to creak open.

The oily smell of torches wafted toward him, ahead of the pursuers who still gathered their courage, but who had waited for him to return.

Taking a last look over his shoulder at the puddle of light outside the shambletown wall, the hawk-eyed youth began to trot to the east
toward the diffused and yet-to-appear glow in the sky that would be all that usually represented the sun.

His breath left a ghostly plume that faded into the darkness and into the beginnings of the ground fog.

The leader of the shambletown pack carried a long staff and lumbered to the edge of the downslope just above the point where the last vestiges of the chokeplume trailed away. He looked northward into the darkness and raised his head as if to scent out the interloper.

A second man joined him, carrying both cudgel and torch.

“See devulkid?”

“No. Think went wilds?”

“Too smarmy.”

The two turned toward the east. To their right was the higher mass that rose into the Maze, and ahead were the rough hummocks through which their quarry had departed.

“Track out?”

“East, then south,” offered a third man.

“South, back to desert,” affirmed the man with the cudgel.

“More than desert. Ships.”

“No ships! Never ships! Ships brought the death!” The first man laid his staff across the arm of the second. “Never!”

The leader shook his head at the unseen devilkid and pointed his staff back at the gate from which they had emerged.

“Back!”

The wind blew the steam of his breath, like a chokeplume, down the hillside toward the river of ground fog that wound its poisoned way toward the north along the thin trickle that had been a river.

Then he turned and began to retrace his steps toward the shambletown, the oasis of hoarded warmth and frugality that represented the only order left on the high plains.

The second man flexed his sore arm and lifted the cudgel, looking eastward into the darkness.

“Gram saw him. Me. Devulkid.” He spat at the ground and made the hope sign in the air.

In turn, he dropped his head, turned, and plodded after the other two as they retreated behind the safety of their wall.

The boy loped across the after-dawn dimness south of the shambletown and north of the windridge toward the hill cave that served as home.

The hide bag he had taken some days earlier from the shambletowners bumped against his chest under the worn, frayed, and ripped tunic that once had been left unattended by a careless owner. Inside the bag, itself held in place by the pressure of the tunic and the loose thonging around his neck, were a handful of the reddish fruits that grew on one scattering of hills south and east of the shambles. The hills were far enough from the shambletown, nearly onto the rolling plains, to discourage casual foraging and open enough to keep the rats from exposing themselves to the coyotes.

The boy had been lucky. Although his battered blade was sharp and his reflexes quick, his leg was not fully healed. But he had not had to test them during the night's trip to the fruit trees.

He feared the foraging parties of the shambletowners far more than the coyotes. The four-footed beasts often traveled alone, almost
never in packs, and preferred to avoid him unless they were close to starving.

The towners took whatever they could find from wherever they found it, but avoided foraging at night and generally stayed close to the foothills and the higher ground where the landpoison was less intense.

The boy's eyes never rested, flicking from one hummock to another, from one patch of grass to the next, from one grubush to the one behind, as his untiring and uneven steps covered the ground between him and his cave and the relative safety it offered.

His ears strained for the telltale rustle of a coyote returning to its den, or for the hiss/squeal of a rat, and his eyes periodically checked the clay for the even rarer trace of a firesnake.

WWWHHHeeeeeee!!!

The intensity of the whistling sound jolted him to a stop, and he covered his ears to block the pain. As the intensity dropped, he uncovered them and tried to localize the source. He sensed that it had started above the clouds and had crossed nearly overhead.

He dropped behind the nearest grubush and waited, waited until the whistle dropped to a whispering from the direction of the hills.

A brief glint of sunbright light flashed—again from the west—and was gone.

The silence was deeper than before as he trotted toward the hills and the light and the whispering sound that had died to nothing. The source of the noise and glare was on his way back, and anything that noisy should have frightened off anything likely to bother him.

Though not counting his steps, he had gone beyond what numbers he knew, far beyond, when he saw the silvery arc above the grubushes.

He slowed his trot and began to slip from bush to bush, from bush to hummock, and from hummock to bush as he angled toward the object that had dropped from the sky.

The smoldering grubushes, the charcoal smell mixing with the faint odor of grubush oil, both told him of the heat the object had created. His feet told him of the rumbling in the clay underfoot, and his ears could sense vibrations he could not hear.

As he neared the silvery object that towered higher than a shambletown wall, he slid behind a mound of clay that reeked of old brick and corroded metal. Beyond the mound, the bushes and other cover were too sparse for a safe approach, not to mention the steaming ground heat.

He waited, but the whining and the vibration did not stop.

Finally, the golden-haired boy peered over the mound again at the source of the sounds. After looking at the shining mass of metal, he blinked. Though the whining sound had not changed, a section of the metal wall had peeled back, and a ramp had been extended.

Thud
.

He could feel the force with which the ramp settled onto the ground, and flattened himself as well as he could behind the mound, trying to keep himself above the ground fog while not letting the plume of his breath show in the increasing light of dawn.

He shivered, wondering what the metal machine on the desert plain meant. Was it one of the ships that the shambletowners always talked about?

Ships. He shrugged and snorted faintly, ignoring the white plume that trailed behind him. Always there were the ships that would come to save them. Even his parents had wondered. But no ship had come to save them from the shambletowners.

If the metal machine was a ship, or from the ships, would it spend the time to save anyone, devilkids or shambletowners?

The whining sound stopped, and the boy peered back over the top of the mound.

Rrrrrrrrrrr
.

The sound echoed across the emptiness as a smaller object positioned itself on the top of the ramp and began to move down toward the ground, tracs clanking on the metal of the ramp.

No sooner was the armored tractor clear of the ramp than the whining began again as the ramp lifted and began to retract.

The tractor began to roll directly toward the mound which shielded the boy.

He scuttled sideways to another mound that barely covered him, but he could tell from the sound that the tractor had shifted direction and still headed toward him.

He looked left, then right, for another cover, making a quick dash to the left, scampering as low as he could, even breathing the ground fog that caught in his lungs like fire.

The roaring increased, louder, and he darted a glance from his hiding place.

Once more, the tractor had switched directions and was headed toward him, now less than a hundred body lengths away from him.

He ran, ran as fast as he could, with the practice of years and the spur of fear.

The pitch of the roaring increased, and the armored tractor increased its speed.

Could he make the gully he had passed earlier, the dry one where the poisons and fog were thinner?

He turned directly east and increased his stride.

In turn, the tractor's roar increased.

Although he refused to look back, concentrating on avoiding the grasp of the grubushes while staying ahead of the machine, he knew that the gap was narrowing, bit by bit.

His breath came raggedly, and the cold air he inhaled tore through his throat, burning like fire. His breath plumes trailed him like banners as he felt the ground begin the gradual rise before the drop-off that was the gully ahead.

Thrumm!

He felt a tingling sensation as something sleeted past his left shoulder, but refused to stop, forcing his legs to keep moving. He could see the drop-off just ahead.

Thrummm!

The strange energy barely cleared his head as he ducked just before the sound. Only a handful of steps remained to the gully.

Thrummm!

He tried to duck and twist, but the blackness rolled up around him, and he could feel himself falling even as it did.