The Forever Hero (3 page)

Corson paused outside the portal. As the chief engineering officer, he had the absolute right to enter any duty space on the ship, but he still hesitated. Marso had the kind of tongue that could strip flesh from bone.

He frowned, then squared his shoulders and keyed the portal with his own code, the one that overrode all but the captain's locks.

“Nooo!”

Corson saw the streak of blond, bent, and spread his arms.

Thud
.

Even at nearly two hundred centimeters and one hundred ten kilos, he was staggered by the impact and set back on his heels. But he refused to let go of the snarling figure that pounded at his mid-section and sent kneecaps toward his stomach.

Corson shifted his grip into the patterns he had learned too
many years before at the Academy and finally fumbled until he had immobilized the smaller figure.

It had to be the boy that Marso's tractor had stunned down on the surface.

He carried the still-squirming youngster back into the combination sick bay/laboratory.

Marso stood there, leaning on the console with her right hand. The scratches on her left cheek still glistened with the dampness of just-applied quick heal.

Corson did not miss the dark smudge beneath her left eye that would likely become a black eye.

His own eyes widened as he took in the snapped straps on the stretcher that had brought the youngster up from the surface with the shuttle.

“How did…?”

“Damned if I know!” snapped the ecologist. “I came in to check him again, and he jumped me. Then you came blundering along and almost let him get away.”

“I…” Corson closed his mouth and tightened his grip on the boy, who seemed stronger than most men he had ever dealt with.

“What do you want me to do with him? Your young man here?”

“He's not that far along yet. No sign of puberty, not overtly, and the initial readouts support that.”

Marso replaced the quick heal back in the cabinet and reached for a pressure syringe.

“What's that for?”

“Put him under for linguistics. I'd like to be able to talk to him. Then maybe so much force wouldn't be necessary.”

“Talk you now,” muttered the boy. His accent was odd, but clear and understandable.

“How did he learn Panglais?”

“He didn't. Panglais is a derivative from simplified Anglish. The maps indicate his ancestors spoke Anglish.”

“Why ship take me?” asked the boy, still twisting to see if he could escape.

“To see if we could help you.”

“Help devulkid? Snort fog!”

Corson raised his eyebrows.

“What does he mean?”

Marso pushed a stray strand of hair back off her forehead. “I suspect it's a rather direct way of saying he doesn't believe us.”

“Devulkid believe none.”

“He thinks he's a devilkid. What does that mean?”

Marso frowned, but did not look directly at the chief engineer.

“There may be some veracity in that assumption, particularly if the metabolic analyses taken while he was unconscious are fully accurate.”

Corson shook his head. Marso had never engaged in scientific doubletalk. Then he nearly smiled. She was trying to clue him without alerting the young savage.

“That much capability for physiological prowess?”

Marso nodded.

“What want devulkid?” interrupted the youth with another squirm that nearly broke Corson's grasp.

“Devilkid needs better talk,” offered the engineer.

“Devulkid talk good.”

Marso edged nearer the squirming figure, pressure syringe ready.

Corson turned slightly to his right to make Marso's effort easier, carrying the boy with him.

“
Ouggh
,” he muttered with a wince as the devilkid's heels crashed into his leg.

Marso slapped the syringe against bare flesh.

The boy convulsed as if a current had passed through him, and it took all of Corson's strength to hold him.

“Hold him!”

Corson said nothing, but glared at the red-haired officer.

By the time the young savage had collapsed, Corson's arms ached, and his back felt stiff and sore.

“Where do you want him?”

“Back on the stretcher. I'll plug him in there, but that won't hold him for more than a standard hour or two.”

“What?”

He'd seen the dosage she'd injected, and it would have laid him out for days.

“Corson. He may be a devilkid indeed. He's not too far from full growth, but the muscular and skeletal development indicates he'll be capable of taking you apart with one hand. If we're wrong, and he's less mature than I think, he could be a physical superman, but I don't think the readouts are that far off.”

“What about brains?” the engineer asked dryly.

“Hard to tell. Probably no genius, but bright enough. Be difficult to tell what cultural retardation has done to his innate capabilities, if anything.”

Corson stretched the slight frame out on the pallet. Marso used three sets of straps before adjusting the headband and contacts.

“Whew! Could use a little freshening.”

“No survival value,” snapped the ecologist.

Corson looked over the boy's face. Even unconscious, he did not appear relaxed. A residual tension centered around the closed eyes, and there was a sharpness to the nose uncommon to a mere boy.

“Is that all he is? Just another specimen?”

“Given time, given some education, he might be human. Right now, he's more like the proverbial wolf child, though I'd bet on him rather than on the wolves. I wonder if he really is a child.”

Corson frowned and rubbed the middle of his forehead with the thumb side of his clinched fist.

“You just said he was.”

Marso continued to work, sitting at the console and adjusting the feed to the headset.

“I said there was no sign of puberty and the associated developments. Those could be delayed because of environmental conditions, diet, who knows what. The other indications are that he may be older than twenty standard years. Brain scan patterns show more than a child's development.”

Corson switched his attention from the lieutenant to the child/man/??? and realized that the unconscious figure's lips were moving.

Marso followed his gaze.

“That's a good sign. Shows verbalization ability is present. The sooner we're on the same wave length the better. Once he gets proper medical care and diet, I don't think brute force, other than sheer imprisonment, will keep him anywhere.”

The chief engineering officer turned to leave.

“Let me know if you need help, brute force variety. I question whether your specimen believes in sweet reason, particularly on the wave lengths you have in mind.”

“We'll see.”

He could feel her eyes boring into his back as he thumbed open the portal and continued his inspection of
H.I.M.S. Torquina
, the newest of the Service's survey vessels, and dispatched for that reason alone to begin the preliminary survey of Old Earth, otherwise known as Terra, that would precede the clean-up pledged by the newly crowned Twelfth Emperor.

He turned in the straps, testing his strength against them. While the straps were more than adequate to hold him, he could tell from their give that he could squirm free in time.

The headset bothered him, but not so much as the headache it had created. So many words…and so many possibilities.

His eyes swam, and he waited, thinking.

“…so you're awake…”

The woman stood on the other side of the room looking at him.

“Yeh.”

“I'm Lieutenant Marso. I don't know your name. Would you like to tell me?”

“Tell what?”

“I see. Let's start more slowly, and less directly.” She frowned and was silent for a moment.

He knew what she wanted, but the words had no reality, no more reality than a shambletowner running the high plains.

The woman began to point at objects, naming each in turn. With each name he found a link in his own mind, and some of the confusion began to sort itself out.

After she had pointed to everything within the compartment, she went to the dispenser and poured herself a drink of water.

He could scent the moisture.

“Would you like some?”

“No.
Yuggg!
”

“This is not like the water on…where you live.” She drank it. “Try some.”

She let him smell the water and dribbled some on his lips. He licked them. The water was nearly tasteless, except for a faint bitter odor and the hint of metal, both far fainter than the landpoisoned water of the plains.

He liked the smell of her better. Clean. Warm, like the flowers of the yucca. Not like the grease of the shambletowners.

“Would you like some?”

“Yeh.”

“Yes,” she corrected.

“Yes,” he mimicked, because she wanted him to, and because there was no reason not to.

She set the cup on the high table beside the bed where he was strapped. After that, she pulled a metal object from a sheath attached to her wide belt.

Thrummm!

He winced at the sound, but watched as the fire from the object struck the floor.

“I am going to let you sit up. If you move toward me, I will use this. Understand?”

“Stand.”

He thought he knew what she meant. She was afraid of him, but the blackness thrower would keep him away. He shivered. Still…she was a woman. Perhaps…later.

Holding the thrower in one hand, she did something underneath the bed with her other, stepping back quickly afterward.

He could feel the straps loosening and began to sit up slowly. Taking the cup in both hands, he sniffed the water again. His nose confirmed that it was safe to drink.

He sipped and waited. After a time he sipped again. The water was clean. Finally, he drained the cup and set it down.

“Are you hungry?”

He looked at her blankly.

“Do you want to eat?”

“Yes.”

She tapped her fingers on the surface beside her, not taking her eyes off him, one hand still holding the weapon.

“Lieutenant Marso here. Need some finger food for our guest. I'd keep it bland and as natural as possible.”

“Natural?”

His eyes widened at the voice from nowhere, but he said nothing.

“He has a well-developed sense of taste and smell.”

“Do what we can, Lieutenant.”

“All I can ask. Thank you.”

The boy watched. She acted like the headman of the shambletowners. She talked to nothing, and someone answered. He must wait, but he was good at waiting, and listening.

MacGregor Corson frowned.

Should he follow through with his impulse? He looked down at the impromptu motor chair he had built. What if he were wrong in his assessment?

He shrugged. Then there would be no problem.

The ecologist had left the devilkid's quarters inside the sick bay, sealed the locks, and headed for the mess.

If she only understood what she would not…

He shrugged again and let his long and heavy strides carry him down the passageway to the sealed cabin. Marso was jealous of her prize, and had set the seals herself. But they had been the engineer's first.

No one else had been in the exterior corridor, nor in the sick bay itself, not surprisingly, since the orbiting ship was in stand-down condition while the techs and their monitors gathered the necessary data.

As he reached the sealed portal he pulled the small kit from his belt pouch and touched the analyzer tips to each side of the plate. The first series of pulses was strictly random. The second built on the reactions to the first.

Marso had thought out the combination well, but he still solved the pattern in six sequences. The portal stood ready to be opened, once he touched the access panel.

The analyzer went back into his belt pouch, and he replaced it with a nerve tangler. The weapon ready, he touched the plate, tightened his finger on the firing stud.

His guess had been correct.

As the portal irised he could see the streak of blond, and he triggered the tangler.

The slim form thudded to the decking halfway through the portal. The boy's legs were twitching uncontrollably from the nerve jolt, and his brown-flecked, hawk-yellow eyes threw anger at the big engineer.

Corson did not touch the devilkid, but used his free hand to drop a loop of cord around one ankle. Then, tangler ready, he dragged the boy back into the cabin, sealing the portal behind them.

He leaned against the portal, waiting until the youngster dragged himself into a sitting position.

“All right, devilkid. Let's get a few things straight.” He eyed the black bulk of the hand-held tangler. “This is a nerve tangler. If I use it enough, your heart will stop. You die. You understand?”

“Stand. I stop.” The tone confirmed the young savage's understanding.

“That's right. Now…do you want to go back to where we found you? Or better yet, back to the shambletown? Isn't that what you called it?”

“Not shambletown.”

Corson studied the boy, realized that in the few weeks aboard the
Torquina
he had changed, more than having gone from a dirty savage to a clean one, or from a scarcely verbal scrabbler for survival to a youngster who could understand most of what the crew said.

Corson nodded to himself. He suspected Marso had been right about diet, and that the ship's food was speeding up, or allowing the return of, physical maturation.

Subtle things, like the look the boy gave Marso when she wasn't paying attention, a bit more heaviness to the jawline, more muscular development across the chest, all were signs of physiological change.

But the devilkid was still a savage, still a danger, mostly because he did not understand the basics of what
any
society was. And Corson was going to have to teach him before it got any later, Marso be damned.

“The shambletown. That's where you'll go if you don't learn.” He glared at the youngster. “First…keep your hands off Lieutenant Marso.”

“Hands off?”

“Devilkid!” snapped the engineer. “You may be the toughest, meanest, strongest animal in the universe, but you hurt
anyone—
anyone!—and I'll tie you in knots with this and leave you in shambletown. You understand?”

There was no response. Corson saw the boy's legs were no longer twitching, and that he was drawing them underneath himself slowly.

Corson fired—twice.

“Ayiii!”

The devilkid lost his balance and tumbled onto his side. Slowly, slowly, he righted himself. Outside of the one exclamation, he had uttered no cry.

Corson's palms were perspiring. The shocks he had directed at the youth would have left even an Imperial Marine totally incapacitated for at least a standard hour. All that they had done to the savage
was paralyze his legs, which was where the engineer had aimed. The peripheral effects normally left most people stunned or incoherent, not to mention the pain that went with the withdrawal.

“Get this straight, little man,” he growled. “You can hurt me. You can hurt the lieutenant. So what? There are one hundred men and women on this ship. One hundred. There are more than one thousand ships where we came from.” He lifted the weapon. “And this is a small tangler. That means you don't hurt people.”

“Don't hurt people,” repeated the youth.

Corson wondered whether he really understood, but decided to go on with his plan. He snapped the tangler in half, separating the butt that contained the power cells from the half that contained the barrel, neural focusing, and trigger. Both halves went back into his belt pouch, since he was bending the regulations to even carry such a weapon within the ship.

Then he palmed the exit stud and reached down, hesitating only momentarily, and lifted the youth.

Corson could feel the devilkid stiffen, but offer no other resistance as Corson carried him through the portal and lowered him into the improvised motor chair.

“Now, we're going to see the ship. All of it. Along the way, I'm going to try to make you understand why you have to behave, why you can't attack people. Force is important, boy. But brute force and strength won't beat a nerve tangler. And it won't beat a ship. It won't beat a thousand ships.”

As they came to the main portal from the sick bay, the engineer tapped the access panel and guided the chair through. He wondered if he should have strapped the devilkid in.

“Corson! What are you doing?”

He sighed and turned toward the sharp voice. If only Marso had taken her time at the mess.

“I'm giving him a guided tour of the ship. If you would like to come, you're welcome, provided you don't interrupt—”

“But he's not—”

“Marso…” The engineer's normally gruff voice deepened into a tone that would have frozen even the captain.

The lieutenant stiffened.

“We'll be back within two standard hours.”

“How did you get him to agree?”

“It took some considerable doing. But I think he understands.”

“Devilkid understands,” the blond youth affirmed.

“Understands what?” clipped the ecologist.

“Devilkid one. Ships many.”

Corson felt his own jaw drop open. He hadn't expected understanding so quickly, and he doubted the boy was sophisticated enough to offer a deliberate lie about an abstract proposition.

“That's right, Mr. Engineer. He's bright. Very bright.”

“Then he should enjoy the tour, Lieutenant Ecologist.”

“He might at that.” The red-headed lieutenant stepped aside as Corson keyed the chair.

Corson watched his charge's eyes follow the ecologist and felt his heart sink.

He was doing his best, but if Marso encouraged the boy (who wasn't likely to stay one much longer), what could he do? He shrugged, though he didn't feel like it.

“Let's start with the bridge, young man.”

He could feel her eyes on his back as the two of them headed up the passageway, the whine of the chair scarcely audible above the gentle hiss of the ventilation system.