The Forever Hero

by L. E. Modesitt Jr.

  “There’s the frame. Not a single millimeter that doesn’t need restressing. Got to be more than a half-million creds of damage.”

  Gerswin frowned, then let his face clear.

  “How long?”

  The tech put down her analyzer probe and turned to face the pilot.

  “Lieutenant Gerswin, we do our very best. So do you, in your own way. But our ancestors, Istvenn take their souls, left a forsaken mess. No one ever designed atmospheric crafts to fly through stone rains and acid winds and come out intact.” She looked down at the already stained permatile flooring.

  “Is it our home, anymore? If they didn’t tell us so, I’d never have guessed. Purple-shaded grass, where it grows, and ground fog that can eat your lungs.” Her eyes came up to meet his. “How you ever got this back, I couldn’t guess. And how long it will take to rebuild it would be a bigger guess.”

  “Thanks,” Gerswin said softly, before turning away from the tech and the battered flitter. “Thanks.”

  He could feel her dark eyes on his back as he walked from the temporary hangar-bunker that served more as a mechanical infirmary than as a maintenance facility.

  “Four flitters, and not a one fit to fly.”

  His steps echoed as he entered the underground tunnel back to the administrative building, buried, like all the others, in the clay and native stone.

  Even though the portal to the ecological laboratory was open, he rapped on the wall, as if he were knocking at another officer’s private quarters.

  No answer. He rapped the metal bulkhead harder.

  Finally, he stepped inside.

  As it often happened, he found the two consoles humming, but unattended, and the swivels all empty. He scanned the telltales on the airlock control chambers, but the indicators on five were amber. Number three blinked both green and amber.

  That was where Mahmood had to be.

  He slumped into one of the swivels opposite a busily humming console to wait, tapping his fingers lightly on the console and whistling a slow dirge.

  Gerswin ignored the cycling of the lock and kept whistling without looking up, even as the ecologist finished unsuiting and racking his labsuit in one of the dozen wall lockers.

  “That’s cheerful…about as uplifting as the subsonics on a hell-burner.” Mahmood Dalgati clicked the locker shut and straightened his impeccable whites before settling himself in the armless swivel behind the farther console, tapping out a series of inquiries on the screen.

  “That’s the way I feel.”

  “I take it that the flitters are all down?”

  “Right. You know that. They’ve been down for days.”

  Senior Lieutenant Dalgati did not immediately reply, but pursed his lips as an entry scripted itself upon his screen.

  Gerswin resumed his dirgelike whistling.

  “Greg.”

  Gerswin stopped the whistling.

  “You and your whistling can depress anyone. I’d suggest another theme, but whatever it was, it would probably get on my nerves. I take it you want to talk.”

  “No.”

  “Oh…you want to fly, to feel productive.”

  Gerswin shrugged.

  “You can’t. Not unless you can figure out how to repair the flitters better and faster than the techs. So why don’t you put that overtrained, but undereducated and underused mind of yours to work instead of haunting the poor techs?”

  Gerswin did not resume his whistling, but kept tapping his fingers on the edge of the console.

  “Now you’re feeling sorry for yourself, that you’re just a poor barbarian from Old Earth, that no one understands you.”

  “Mahmood….”

  The ecologist laughed, gently. “Please don’t bother with your dangerous voice. I’m well aware that, as a relatively untrained Service officer, your reflexes make you about twice as deadly as the average Corpus Corps officer.”

  “You exaggerate, Mahmood.” Gerswin returned the laugh, his initial bark subsiding to a chuckle, although he did not sound amused. “Are you suggesting something?”

  “I suggest nothing, my underactive friend. All things come to those who wait, particularly if they understand what they’re waiting for.”

  “Ridiculous.”

  “No. Realistic. One’s expectations color the surrounding world, and yours more than most. You have yet to learn what to expect, or what you want to expect.

  “Have you ever studied the tapes of the Old Earth master painters? Or read the old Anglish poets in the original? Studied the old and outdated terrain maps? Tried to understand the ecology before it collapsed?

  “Do you want your planet restored? Or do you want to badger the techs?”

  Gerswin straightened up in the swivel.

  “So I have to know what I want, is that it? What difference does it make?”

  “I wouldn’t put it quite that way. Permit me to digress momentarily, my friend.”

  “You always do.” Gerswin leaned forward in the swivel, then tilted himself farther backward.

  Mahmood pursed his lips and looked down at his screen. He touched the keyboard in several places until he was satisfied. Finally, he stood. Circling to his left, he looked at Gerswin, halting behind his console. The effect was undeniably that of a professor behind his podium.

  “Right now, Greg, you’re little more than a step above those barbarians you call shambletowners.”

  Another short bark issued from the pilot. “That’s probably more than some would grant me.”

  “You are marvelously trained in techniques, and better trained than that in some weapons, but your mind has never considered the reasons for such training.”

  “Mahmood, spare me the rationalizations and the philosophy. If a flitter is up, it’s up. If it’s down, it’s down. If it can be fixed, then you fix it.”

  “And if it can’t be fixed, you give up?”

  “You don’t fly.”

  “Do you need to fly? Isn’t there more than one route to a destination? Do you always have to rely on the biggest or the fastest or the latest piece of machinery?”

  “Don’t ask such stupid questions. You’re humoring me, and I’m not in the mood for being humored.” Gerswin was out of his seat, circling the other side of the office. “I’m flying through trash because no one else seems to be able to get even one damned data run. Because no one can program the dozers without terrain data. Because we’re going to run out of time…”

  The blond man with the eyes of a hawk turned on the professor and jabbed a finger. “You can sit and lecture. Or stand and lecture. Puzzle the riddles of the universe. Take forever to find the perfect solution. Right now, good old Terra is a curiosity. Oh, yes, the wonderful Empire will fix her up good. Now. What about tomorrow? Is it going to last? How long? How many flitters? How many dozers? How many young techs and pilots will they let good old Mother Earth murder before the great, grand, and glorious Empire gives up?

  “There’s nothing of worth left. No cheap metals. No radioactives. Nothing grows.”

  Gerswin picked up a swivel one-handed, holding it at arm’s length.

  “Look, Mahmood! Look! Now, how long can I hold this thing? Twice, three times as long as you can? Ten times? After some time I have to put it down. So…old Terra has an emotional hold on the Empire. For now. But what happens when the next Emperor has to let go? What happens if they put us down before the ecology is fixed?”

  His voice softened to a whisper as he replaced the swivel on the tiles.

  “Nobody thinks I think, just that I react.”

  He stared across the office at the ecologist, who had involuntarily retreated until his back had touched the row of wall lockers.

  “Maybe I will read some of the old poets…and look at the old master painters. Maybe I will…and maybe I’ll learn more weapons and the philosophy behind them. It just might make me angrier. But I’ll take your advice, Mahmood, until everything is trained. And I’ll read everything I haven’t read. And then we’ll
see.”

  His voice sounded more like the call of the hawk he resembled as he concluded, “Then we’ll see.”

  The ecologist wiped his damp forehead in the silence of the laboratory where he stood alone.

  XXII

  Gerswin touched the inner portal stud and stepped through the endurasteel arch as the door irised open. The inner and outer portal arrangement that led outside reminded him of an airlock.

  He laughed once, aware of the sharp echo from the composite blue walls of the small chamber, and touched the second stud.

  As the exterior portal opened, he marched through the center, out into the chill of the twilight, the wind ripping through his uncovered hair, the fine dust gritting against his skin like a continual abrasive.

  Once outside, he kept walking eastward over the hard and uncovered clay, the reddish purple like solidified blood in the dim light that signified the sun’s descent behind the shadows of the mountains to the west.

  He stumbled as his right boot caught in a depression concealed by the heavier dust that took nearly a landspout to lift. He lurched, but regained his balance without slowing his pace.

  Each meter forward took him that much farther away from the sheltering bulk of the artificial ridge under which the administration complex was housed.

  Looking to the south, he could see the general outlines of the next artificial ridge, the one that contained the hangar bunkers.

  When the ground dipped toward a dust-filled ravine, he stopped. No telling how deep the gully was under the heavy dust.

  With the adjustment of his eyes to the darkness and his hearing to relative stillness, Gerswin turned back to face northeast, where remained the shambletown, the Maze, and what was left of the ruins. The Denv ruins were one of the few clusters left on the Noram continent, protected from the worst of the landspouts by the natural depression in which the old city had been built, and by the closeness of the foothills and the mountains behind.

  His breath left a trail. The freezing temperature would have chilled most Imperials, but Gerswin was more than comfortable in his light jacket and flight suit, free of the continual pressure of people and walls.

  Strange how he never noticed the crowding until he took the time to step away from it.

  He began to walk north, lengthening his strides until the ground seemed to melt away under the quick steps, until the bulk of the artificial hills dwindled away behind him and he was exposed to the full bite of the wind cutting in from the plains.

  A rustle in the bushes to his right signaled a rat scurrying away, dropping into a hole leading beneath the surface and into what Gerswin imagined was an intertwining of rubble, animal tunnels, and undamaged foundations long since covered and forgotten beneath the hilly terrain above.

  A low series of isolated bulges appeared to his left. Gerswin slowed, then stopped, and studied the evenness of the spacing.

  He stepped toward the uprisings, each waist-high, each circular and perhaps a meter across. Bending down, he squinted, then ran his fingers over the powdered smoothness. The pressure caused more of the white powder to flake off.

  Gerswin studied the low pillars. The sides toward the mountains were relatively straight, but the eastern sides sloped outward as they neared the ground, the weathering clearly directional in nature.

  He began to walk westward, then turned north again, his eyes piercing the dark and running over each pillar he passed. After completing a quick circuit of the area, Gerswin pursed his lips. The thick pillars covered an area nearly a half a kilometer square.

  He didn’t know whether to be more impressed by the size of the structure they had supported, or by the fact that nothing but what appeared to be the foundation remained.

  Shaking his head, he turned his steps back to the north and the ridge ahead, from which, if he remembered correctly, he could survey the territory he had once foraged.

  Under his light steps, as the temperature dropped, the ground began to squeak. The wind’s whisper rose to a thin whine to match the cutting edge it turned upon the rolling hills and the man who walked them toward a ridge top.

  Gerswin ignored the sound of his footsteps and the familiar song of the night wind as he trotted up the increasing incline toward the lookout, toward the ledge he remembered, where, in the darkness, a careful devilkid could watch the coyotes slink out of the hills toward the edges of the shambletown in their efforts to drag down an unsuspecting towner, or watch the movements of the ratpacks from the hidden tunnels that were all that had remained of the city that had stretched for kays along the front of the hills.

  He patted the pair of stunners tucked inside his jacket. While neither should be necessary, to be prepared for the unnecessary was how he had survived outside the walls of the shambletown for so long, away from the guards, the walls, and the fires, and away from the scrawny plants that grew in carefully purified soil beds.

  A two-toned whistle added a mournful air to the song of the wind, to the darkness of the starless night, as the man who had been a devilkid slipped up the trail to a view of his past.

  XXIII

  “Red three! Red three! Lieutenant Gerswin to the Ops center. Lieutenant Gerswin to the Ops center. Red three!”

  Gerswin yanked on his boots and palmed the exit panel stud, ignoring the chimes from his own console. He could learn more once he was in Operations.

  Moving through the portal at double time, he twisted and flipped himself to the side to avoid the other man in the corridor.

  “Excuse me, Commander.” The pilot snapped off a quick salute.

  “Don’t mind me, Mister Gerswin. Just get to Ops.”

  “Yes, ser,” Gerswin said over his shoulder.

  He could see Commander Lancolnia’s reflection in the metallic joints between the building sections. The commander was still shaking his head as Gerswin turned the corner toward the tunnel from his quarters to the Ops center.

  While Operations was protected by a double portal, only a single guard was stationed at the entry console, not surprisingly, since the entire complex was secured, built to take the worst the weather and the locals—what few ventured from the shambletown—could dish out.

  “Lieutenant Gerswin.”

  He offered his pass and slammed his palm onto the console screen.

  “Captain Matsuko said for you to meet him at G.C., ser.”

  “Thank you.”

  “Yes, ser.”

  Gerswin went through the portals on a double bounce, feet scarcely touching the tiles.

  Ground control was fifty meters down the operations corridor, directly beneath the low control tower that crouched over the bunker. The tower monitored both the flitter approaches, as well as the infrequent shuttles from the few I.S.S. ships to visit Old Earth.

  Captain Matsuko was waiting, standing behind the three consoles monitoring the flitters and the field traffic.

  “Interrogative power status, Outrider three. Interrogative power status.”

  “Port thruster in the yellow. Point seven zero. Starboard in the red. Point five zero and falling.”

  Matsuko drew Gerswin aside.

  “Zeigler took three out, with Frantz as copilot. Topographic profiles, shot at an angle, for the ecologists. Zeigler hit a sheer line wrong, forgot to lock his harness, hit the overhead. Out cold.”

  “You need me to get her back? Talk her in?”

  “Stet.”

  Gerswin pulled a seat up to the center console and scanned the screens, trying to assimilate the position of the disabled flitter and the meteorological data.

  Without thinking, his head was shaking.

  “Outrider three, Gerswin here. Interrogative full power on starboard thruster.”

  “Point five at the detente.”

  “Interrogative altitude and airspeed.”

  “Altitude is one thousand minus. Airspeed is one fifty. Rate of descent is one hundred per minute on full power. Estimated time on starboard thruster is two to five minutes.”

 
Gerswin looked at Matsuko, blanking the comm link.

  “She’s over the rock piles. Take her more than six minutes to clear.”

  His eyes took in the displays, measuring, trying to calculate a vector to the flatlands or even the plains hills that would not force her to cross the sheer line again.

  The line that had crippled the pilot and the flitter was nearly stationary, due east of Outrider three.

  “Turn one six five.”

  “Turning one six five. Power on starboard thruster is point four and falling. Power on port is point six. Altitude above ground nine hundred minus.”

  Gerswin watched as the blip, representing the flitter edged more southward toward the flattest terrain possible.

  “Outrider three. Lag factor on that radalt is fifty meters. Lag factor is fifty meters.”

  “Stet. Lag factor is fifty.”

  “Interrogative status on tail compensator. Status on compensator.”

  “Tail compensator—what…?”

  “Status of tail compensator.” Gerswin’s fingers curled around the console keyboard’s edge, digging in, but his voice remained level.

  “Compensator has no reading. Crew visual indicates no compensator.”

  “Stet. No compensator. Begin, blade deployment sequence. I say again. Begin blade deployment sequence.”

  “Stet. Beginning blade deployment sequence.”

  “Outrider three. When the blades lock, hit the power disconnect. As soon as the blades lock, hit the power disconnect, and dump the thrusters. Do you understand?”

  “Blades locked, hit the disconnect…dump thrusters.”

  “That’s affirmative. No power descent. Pick out the levelest spot you can dead ahead. Keep your nose down. Radalt hits one fifty, you flare. Flare at one fifty. At one hundred, pull full-blade angle. One hundred, full-blade angle.”

  “Stet. Power flare at one fifty, full-blade angle at one hundred.”

  “That’s affirmative.”

  Matsuko’s hand blanked the comm link.

  “What are you doing?”

  Gerswin did not take his eyes off the console.