The Trouble With Heroes....

The Trouble With Heroes…..

Jo Beverley

Smashwords Edition

(This novella was first published in the
collection Irresistible Forces.)

Copyright 2004 Jo Beverley

Table of Contents

The Trouble With Heroes
…. A
science fiction novella 25,000 words

Some details of other SF&F fiction by Jo
Beverley

An excerpt of the upcoming historical romance,
Seduction in Silk.

About Jo Beverley

Chapter 1

Refugees.

A dead word from the Earth history books had
shockingly come to life. Jenny Hart first heard it at the print
shop as she was closing her station ready to go home.

“…
a queue of refugees that goes out of
sight and beyond because the gates of Anglia are closed for the
first time during the day in living memory.”

The office screen ran Angliacom most of the
day and Jenny was used to treating it as background noise. It took
a moment to register, but then she turned to stare at the wall. The
screen was split into max cells, but Sam Witherspoon, the manager,
had the volume pegged to the picture of a line of crowded vehicles
on the road. Buses, lorries, even farmvees of one sort or
another.

“
Refugees?” Sam echoed
blankly.

“
Like from plague, famine, and war?”
Jenny asked, and they looked at each other.

She’d asked a question, but she knew. He
probably knew, too.

“
The blighters,” she said.

He turned and picked up his case. “I’d better
get home. Lock up, all right?”

“
Sure,” Jenny was still staring at the
screen, but she knew why he was rushing away. He had a family.
Children. Probably her mother would be fretting about
her.

She picked up a phone and claimed a screen
cell for it. Her mother liked to see her children when she was
worried. Her younger brother’s face came on first. He took one look
and yelled, “Mum! Jenny!”

Madge Hart appeared, red hair wild, eyes
flashing. “Are you all right?”

“
Of course I am, mum. I’m not outside,
you know.”

“
But isn’t it awful? Those poor people.
We should take them in. But they say there’s more and more, and
room elsewhere. But they’ll end up out in the dark. I don’t
know.”

“
It makes no difference, mum. Blighters
don’t care whether it’s night or day.” All the same, Gaians didn’t
like to be outside at night.

“
It’s all panic,” her mother said,
clearly remembering her maternal duty to reassure her children. “If
there was real trouble, we’d know.”

“
That’s right.”

“
Are you coming home for
dinner?”

“
Not right now. I want to see if I can
find out what’s really going on.”

“
That’s a good idea. Ask Dan. He’ll
know. Bring him home for dinner as long as it’s not too late. He’s
been looking peaky.”

“
Right, mum.”

Jenny clicked off before she smiled. Her
mother had fussed over Dan since he’d been a toddler, long before
he’d been spotted as a fixer and sent off to the Gaian Center for
Investigation and Control of the Hostile Amorphic Native Entities –
generally known as Hellbane U. Now he was back and living on his
own in the fixer’s flat, she acted as if he might be starving to
death. It wasn’t as if he didn’t have a family of his own here.

She powered down the screen and checked the
place over, then went out, coding the lock. Where to go for news?
The Merrie England pub?

No. She wanted to go up on the walls to see
for herself. God knew why. A camera did a better job than human
eyes, but she was sure the walls were crowded with gawkers. The
Olde English battlements and turrets had always seemed like a
pleasant whimsy, but as Jenny hurried toward the nearest steps, she
wished they really could keep an enemy out.

They couldn’t. In nearly two hundred years,
Anglia had only experienced one blighter attack, but one was enough
to show thick walls and drawbridges were no protection at all.
Sixty-eight years ago, in the lovely Public Gardens, a blighter had
killed a child in front of her horrified mother. Rendered her into
a pile of greasy ash amid her pink pantsuit. There were photos.

A statue in the Gardens depicted a beautiful
little girl holding a posy of flowers. Quite likely she'd been a
pest, but she hadn’t deserved to die in terror like that. No one
did.

“
Hostile amorphic native entities.”
That was how the exploratory services had labeled the one, puzzling
problem on an otherwise perfect settlement planet.
HANES.

Technically accurate, but it hadn’t captured
reality. Within a generation they had become known as hellbanes,
and some settlements had their own name as well. Anglia, with
typical wry humor, called them blighters. No coincidence that back
on Earth blight had been a disease that turned plants to slime. But
the Frankland “terreurs” was perhaps a better word. Jenny could
feel it now, in herself and in the people all around, milling in
gossip, heading to the walls, or hurrying home to protect or be
protected.

Fear. Deep, formless fear, as if something
terrible was blowing on the winds from the south.

An arm snagged around Jenny’s waist and she
whirled.

“
Gyrth!”

Gyrth Fletcher was thin, long-faced, with
blond curls and beard that made him look as if he'd stepped out of
a medieval manuscript.

"Want to come down a dark passageway with me,
pet?" he asked in mock villain voice.

She winked at him. "Depends what you're
offering, don't it?"

"A better view. From an arrow slit."

"Lead on!"

He worked for wall maintenance, so he’d know
those passageways, but the main appeal was company. That’d blow
away her creepy feelings.

She couldn’t help stating, "There's no real
danger to being outside in the dark."

"Right.” He didn’t sound any happier than she
was about it.

"Perhaps we should go and look for Dan. He’ll
know what’s going on.”

"He's probably in a stuffy room discussing
the situation with the Witan.”

"I suppose.”

Strange to think of Dan as official like
that. They'd been born within weeks of each other three houses
apart, and according to her mother, been stuck together like
toffees until they reached that age when the other sex suddenly
seems alien. Before they’d had time to get over that, he’d tested
positive for fixing and been sent to Hellbane U.

Bloody fixing. His three fortnights home each
year hadn’t been enough to keep the closeness over eight years,
especially when Jenny had known he'd not come back in the end.
Fixers didn't. They went where they were needed, and they always
seemed to be needed far away. Anglia's fixer before Dan had been
from Cathay.

“
You all right, Jenny?”

“
Sure. Where’s this arrow slit? Perhaps
we’ll be able to hear what people are saying out there."

They held hands so they wouldn’t be pulled
apart in the crowd, but Jenny was thinking about Dan. Her childhood
friend. Anglia’s fixer. The one who’d be expected to deal with any
blighters who invaded here. Sure, fixers trained to fight
blighters, but there weren’t any. Not here, at least, or anywhere
far from the equator. So they fixed other things. Broken machines.
Broken bones. Broken hearts if the break was physical. Things that
didn’t fight back.

"If there's trouble in the south, do you
think Dan’ll have to go to fight blighters there?" she asked.

Gyrth stopped and shook his head at her.
"Hellbane U’ll deal with it. They're not going to leave the towns
without a fixer, are they? Not short of something desperate. And it
can't be desperate. Didn't Dan say that blighters are so rare they
have to hunt them to find one for the graduates to zap in their
final test?"

"Yes, but then why the refugees?"

"You’re such a worrier! What did that old
Earth politician say? We have nothing to fear but fear itself. Come
on."

Jenny went, but asked, “Have you ever thought
it’s strange that Dan came back here? Fixer’s don’t.”

“
He said once that he asked. Apparently
most don’t.’ He grinned. “You’ve got to admit that a lot of times
the town wishes he hadn’t. He’s a right change from quiet Miss
Lixiao.”

That he was. When Dan had left he’d been
mischievous and thoughtful, and he’d come back wary and wild. It
was a good wild, though, making him the burning heart of a group of
lively twenty-somethings. Jenny wasn't sure she fit in with all the
group, but she spent time with them because of Dan. She and he
weren’t toffees anymore, but they were still friends. Friends
enough to worry.

They reached High Wall Street and the width
of it meant she could let go of Gyrth's hand. Thirty feet wide, it
was edged on one side by railings overlooking the lower street, and
on the other by shops, pubs, and cafes that backed onto the wall.
So how did they get to an arrow slit from here?

Gyrth headed toward the space between
Porter's Pies and Castleman's Ironmongery.

“
Down there?” Jenny asked
dubiously.

“
It’s safe.”

But then he stopped, waved, and shouted.
Jenny saw his sister Polly and her husband Assam wave back then
walk toward them. Or rather, Polly waddled. She was pregnant and
bigger every time Jenny saw her. It didn't seem she could swell
anymore and not burst, but she still had a few weeks to go.

It was the first pregnancy for any of Jenny's
friends and they were all watching it with fascination. Well, the
women were fascinated; she thought the men were slightly appalled.
It hadn't deterred them from sex, mind you, but then, no one got
pregnant by accident anymore, thank heavens.

"We're going to get a better view from a
slit," Gyrth told them. "Want to come?"

"I'll stick!" Polly protested, but in the end
she and Assam went with them.

There was no real danger of Polly getting
stuck, but it was definitely single file. Rubbish crunched under
Jenny's shoes, some of it stinky, and despite the fact that the
ginnel was open to the sky two stories above, she began to feel
trapped.

Or perhaps the faint pulse of panic was
because of refugees, blighters, and war.

She was ready to give up and turn back when
they reached the maintenance passage, wide enough for two or three.
As a bonus, it was either cleaned regularly or the rubbish didn't
drift this far. Gyrth led them to an arrow slit directly above the
gate, one rank higher than the one being used by the officials.
From here, the amplified voice was clear, though the response were
indistinct.

Driven by her strange urgency, Jenny wasn't
her usual polite self. She climbed first into the embrasure and
worked forward to the slit. It was six foot high but only about a
foot wide. Even so, standing there the world was spread before her,
and all the voices outside were clear.

"What's going on?" Gyrth asked.

"Someone's asking distances to Skanda."

Jenny wished she knew how far back the queue
went, but it wove out of sight between a coppice not far away.

"Didn't they used to keep the space around
castles clear,” she asked Polly, a history teacher. “So they could
see an enemy coming?"

Polly was leaning against the wall rubbing
her stomach. "Certainly. But it’s not as if anyone could see a
blighter coming, or stop it if they did."

"Shame. I see how these work. I could fire
arrows out at the enemy, and they wouldn't be able to hit me.”

"Seems a bit unsporting to me," Assam said,
clearly teasing his wife.

Polly punched his arm. "War was not a
sport."

Gyrth jumped up into the space. "Let me have
a look, Jenny."

She gave way and climbed back out. There'd
been nothing out there to settle whatever was bothering her.

"I don't know about sport,” she said, joining
the other two. ‘Tournaments and things. And didn't they have what
they called `war games' even in recent times?"

"Probably still do," Polly said. “They still
have war, though mostly robotic. Thank heavens for peaceful
Gaia.”

Jenny rubbed her arms, suddenly cold in this
dank, shadowy space. "I wish our ancestors had chosen a more
peaceful design."