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.
X
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 bes
t, 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.
XI
“Why start so high? So far inland?”
“Because it won’t do any good to start any lower.”
“Run that by me again.”
“The chemical contamination is so high that you have to clean the land and the watersheds from the headwaters down. Otherwise—”
“—the rivers and the winds just recontaminate what you’ve cleaned.”
“The rivers. We can’t control the winds. Not until we can restore ground cover, get some trees in the high watersheds.”
“You’re talking centuries.”
“Probably longer. We don’t have accurate maps of the topography, nor any detailed analyses of the compounds poisoning the land. And Istvenn knows what they did to the ground water.”
“What about the oceans?”
“A quick scan indicates they’ve got some buffering ability, but there’s too much in the way of sulfur compounds. Balanced flora/fauna population, but too thin for my liking. But they’ll recover long before we can reclaim the land. We’ll have to set up a handful of extraction plants for the worst toxic hot spots on the continental shelves. Projections indicate that would do it in the worst cases.”
“What about the future?”
“Hard to say, but I’d recommend against any disruption of the soil. Has to be an agricultural economy, if we even get that far, for dozens of centuries.”
“You make it sound so cut and dried.”
“Hardly. The theory’s easy enough. So are the techniques—in theory. But in practice? No. That won’t be easy. You can’t manufacture anything in this system, and that means a massive resource drain for the Empire. This Emperor may allow it, but this project will need work for the lives of more than a few emperors. Just can’t be done in less than centuries and billions of creds worth of equipment…Maybe it can’t be done at all.”
XII
“You need a name.”
“Have name. Devulkid.”
The lieutenant shook her head, short red hair fluffing out with the motion. “That would not be acceptable and could certainly cause problems.”
“Problems?”
“Difficulties, hard places.”
The blond-haired young man wearing the unmarked tan shipsuit wrinkled his nose, as if at the smell of landpoisons.
“Hard places with name?”
The lieutenant smiled faintly. “It does sound strange when you put it that way. But you need a name, at least two names.”
“Two names? One person?”
“Call it the Empire’s way of doing things. Like the ships, like the uniforms.”
“Two names for one person?” repeated the devilkid.
“Some people have three names,” admitted the lieutenant.
“Three names?”
Lieutenant Marso nodded.
“How many names for you?”
“Three. Jillian…K’risti…Marso.”
“The big man has three names?”
“Major Corson? Two, I think. MacGregor Corson.”
“Why two names?” asked the blond youth again, as if the lieutenant had yet to answer the question.
“Look. If you want to go to the transitional school, if you want a chance at going to the Academy, you have to have two names. Any two names. You can have three if you want, but you have to have two.”
“School needs two names for devilkid?”
“That’s right. Both the transitional school and the Academy, if you make it that far, require two names. Two names and a number.”
“Number?”
“Don’t worry about that. Once you decide on the names, we’ll use them to get you your imperial ID number. That won’t be a problem at all.”
The devilkid frowned as he sat uneasily in the ship swivel across from the lieutenant.
“Devilkid choose names. Empire choose number?”
“Right.”
The curly-haired blond pursed his lips, but said nothing.
“Did your parents ever give you a name?”
“No name.” His tone was more abrupt than before.
“I could read you some names and see if you like them.”
“No.”
“All right. But you’ll have to choose something.”
“Gerswin? Means what?”
“I called you that when you whistled that strange little melody. A gerswin is a music-maker, a wild singer, sort of like a dylanist, but the power is mostly in the music and not in the words.”
The devilkid looked back at the Imperial lieutenant blankly.
“Gerswin means music, like your whistling,” she repeated.
“MacGregor? That means?”
“Once it meant ‘son of Gregor.’ Now it has no special meaning.”
“Corson means?”
“Son of Cor,” the lieutenant answered uneasily.
“The big man, the major? Two fathers?”
Lieutenant Marso laughed. “Some would say he had none. But, no. He has just one father. Sometimes, names are chosen because people like them. They like the way the names sound.” She frowned momentarily. “You have several days before you have to choose. Now that you’ve passed the initial screening tests, the transitional school will give you other tests, tests with more words.”
“More words?”
“More words,” affirmed the woman. “That is, if you want to learn more. If you don’t want to go back to the shambletown.”
A shadow crossed the young face.
“Learn…means not to go back to shambles?”
“Learning means much more than that. The more you learn, the more you can do. If you can make it through the transitional school, they you could go to the Academy—”
“Academy means learn more?”
“If you can.”
“Devulkid learn. Learn everything.”
XIII
In “Warfare, Basic Theories of [4/C, BC W-101],” Gerswin’s console was in the third row, second one from the far right aisle.
The instruction hall itself was similar to all the others, with identical consoles with the identical gaps into which unidentical cadets placed their identical bridge modules, incidentally recording their presence while allowing them direct access to their individual data banks.
The thirty fourth-classers stood beside their consoles, waiting at standing rest for Gere Yypres Gonnell, Major, Retired [Disability], I.S.S., who was listed as their professor.
“Ten’stet!” rang the tenor voice of the section adjutant.
Gerswin stiffened with all the others, exactly in key with their motions, although he could have easily beaten them into position.
“At ease,” squeaked an amplified voice.
Gerswin watched the instructor’s podium and the figure who moved behind it with jerky steps.
“Please be seated, Cadets,” the squeaky and raspy voice added.
Gerswin sat, but wondered. He could see the shimmering metal bands around the professor, could see that while the professor’s throat moved, his mouth barely opened.
“For those of you who have not met me, and that may well be all of you, I am indeed Major Gonnell, otherwise referred to as ‘old-gonna-hell,’ ‘old metal bones,’ or other endearments less flattering. This is the class technically referred to as ‘Warfare, Basic Theories of.’”
A raspy sound like tearing patch tape followed.
“Excuse me, but subvocalization is not perfect.”
A clanking sound followed.
“All of you are supposed to have read chapter one of the text. Knowing the Academy and the idealism with which you all approach your studies, you all have.”
&
nbsp; An intake of breath that would have been laughter at any non-military institution punctuated the otherwise silent instruction hall.
“The title of the course is incorrect. A more accurate description might be ‘A Few Guesses as to Why Societies Fight.’”
Gerswin tabbed in the new title, noting that few others did.
“A standard hour a day for four months is totally inadequate for those of you who survive the institution to practice the profession, but I hope to make a small dent in your ignorance and to let you know how little you really know, in the hopes that you will at some future time be inspired to actually learn the subject.”
The metal figure swiveled as if to survey the hall.
“Cadet Culvra, what does Adtaker mean when…”
“Cadet Hytewer, describe the Empire in the terms outlined by Hyrn…”
Gerswin noted most of the questions, but few of the answers. From the pace of the inquiries from the professor, he began to understand why the major had gotten the reputation he had.
“Cadet Resia, you have just asserted that wars are caused by scarcities. If that were true, would not all warring between systems be non-existent?”
Cadet Resia did not answer, but kept his square face directly pointed toward the major.
“Come now. We have had wars between systems. I have some personal experience which I doubt is a fiction.” At that, he raised a metal-bound arm. “Yet the costs of building jumpships, the energy costs of jumping with stored power, the relative abundance of raw materials in all but the most crowded systems—all these would indicate that scarcity could not be a motive for war except in a limited number of systems, say perhaps a dozen. Those systems, however, lack the knowledge and resources to build a jumpship space force.”
“That doesn’t prevent others from occupying them,” observed a red-haired young woman in the first row.
“While I was prodding Cadet Resia, I will accept that observation, Cadet Karsten. If your interjection is true, then scarcity and weakness prompt others to war over the least desirable systems. Is not that the logical outcome of your observation?”
Gerswin frowned. If what the discussion was leading to actually followed, then war could only be fought for noneconomic reasons.
The Forever Hero Page 4
