The Forever Hero

by L. E. Modesitt Jr.

  Crump.

  The devilkid collapsed as his last stone rebounded off a pillar into Gerswin’s ribs. Gerswin ignored the bruised feeling and approached the limp body carefully. While he could tell the youth was unconscious, he had to wonder if there was another devilkid nearby.

  The boy could have easily beaten Gerswin to the nearly hidden split in the rocks at the edge of the valley had he not changed directions.

  Gerswin threw himself sideways.

  Crack!

  The second devilkid also had a sling, and knew how to use it. The stone had passed through the spot where Gerswin had been standing instants before, and only a faint whir had tipped him off, a sound so soft he doubted that anyone but a devilkid could have heard it.

  Crack!

  Gerswin dropped behind a pillar.

  Nodding to himself, he calculated the newest devilkid’s position, right behind a stone heap beside the split in the twenty meter high stone wall from which both had come.

  He uncoiled himself across the distance to another and shorter pillar, skidding behind it as his boots nearly lost all purchase on the clay-covered pavement underfoot. The next pillar stood five meters uphill, a distance he would have to cover mostly in the open, but that position would give him the altitude to get a shot behind the stones.

  Glancing back, he could see the first devilkid still lying unconscious and face down on the dark clay between the truncated pillars.

  Gerswin knelt and pried loose a rock, or rather what looked to be a section of an antique brick of some sort. He hefted it in his right hand, still holding the stunner in his left. Lofting it toward the stone pile shielding the devilkid, he timed his departure for the next pillar as the stone clattered down.

  Skidding behind the pillar, Gerswin watched as the devilkid ran downhill toward the stream, well out of range before Gerswin could bring the stunner to bear.

  The I.S.S. officer bounded back downhill, sprinting full speed for a moment, then settling into a ground-covering lope.

  Gerswin’s smile was fixed on his face, grimly fixed. There was no cover below the pillared area where the spring rose for at least two kays, just scoured and smooth clay, which meant that the devilkid had every expectation of being able to outrun him.

  Gerswin stepped up his pace slightly, and immediately saw he was beginning to close on the tattered tunic of the other. The devilkid had cleverly maneuvered him into a position where he couldn’t use the stunner until the devilkid was well on the run.

  By now the ground was flatter, and the edges of the valley were beginning to melt into the rolling terrain of the lower plains. Gerswin kept his legs moving evenly and his stride in rhythm, even as the devilkid tried to increase the pace.

  Gerswin did not break stride as he watched the other gain ten meters. Slowly, his longer and more even stride began to narrow the distance between them once again.

  Still, by the time he was within thirty meters, he could feel his own heart thudding, and he slowly brought the stunner into position.

  Thrumm!

  The devilkid’s right leg spasmed. He tumbled into a heap, but still tried to crawl before fumbling with a set of leather straps.

  Thrumm!

  Thrumm!

  It took Gerswin two shots to get the devilkid, in his haste to avoid taking another hit from the deadly sling.

  As he closed on the stunned devilkid, he noted the red hair, the too-thin face, the concealed curves, and realized that his second quarry had been a girl.

  He bent to scoop up the sling, suppressing the wince he would have liked to express as his ribs protested. While he doubted that the rebounding stone had cracked them, the muscles were certainly bruised.

  He shook his head, gingerly. The computer analyses had given him more than enough locations to check out, and he still had another ten of the most likely to do, with less than two weeks remaining on his leave.

  Matsuko had been firm. Firm, but fair. If Gerswin spent his own time corraling devilkids, and if they could be reindoctrinated with some basics, and if they could pass the intelligence and aptitude tests, then, and only then, would he recommend training.

  Gerswin shouldered the girl’s limp and all-too-light body and began the uphill march back to the first devilkid, trying to make his steps as quick as possible.

  He disliked leaving anyone unconscious in such terrain, but neither the rats nor the coyotes liked daytime, and there had been no shambletowners near when he had taken off after the girl.

  He broke into a trot, slipped another power cell into the stunner, awkwardly, since he was moving and balancing the girl. Then, as he holstered the stunner, he picked up the pace.

  As he passed the blackened sinkhole where the stream disappeared into the clay, the hint of a familiar and rancid odor drifted to him on the wind.

  He sighed, and tried to step up his trot, hoping he could get back to the pillar area before the shambletowners took out their frustrations and long-time hates on the unconscious devilkid.

  Scrpppp.

  The sound had come from the rocks on the left side of the valley, and the scent of shambletowners strengthened.

  Gerswin glanced over at the rocky area in time to see a figure diving for cover.

  He was on the right side of the stream, exposed to view, but too far from any of the sheltered spots on the left for a slingstone to have too damaging an impact, if indeed any of the shambletowners had the nerve to try.

  Except for a quick survey of the area, there had been little contact with the Birmha shambletown, and no reason to maintain such contact when the base resources were already spread so thinly and when the shambletowners themselves seemed to resent any intrusion.

  Plick! Plick!

  Large, isolated raindrops began to fall from the darkening clouds as Gerswin topped the last rise where the ground leveled out onto the narrow valley floor.

  A slinking figure darted toward the clearing where the devilkid presumably still lay.

  Thrumm!

  Plick! Plick, plick.

  The stunner bolt passed over the pillar behind which the shambletowner had dived. The scene was silent, except for the rain and the pad-pound of Gerswin’s feet.

  He slid to a stop at the edge of the clearing, nearly losing his hold on the girl. The boy was still crumpled where Gerswin had dropped him. Gerswin lowered the girl next to a pillar and crossed to the boy, studying the surrounding area and listening.

  Whrrr!

  Crack!

  Gerswin rolled forward, wincing as his bruised muscles protested the sudden movement.

  The two shambletowners were neither as sure nor as quick as the devilkids had been. He located them instantly, still not in cover.

  Thrummm!

  One pitched forward. The other ran.

  Thrumm!

  The second shambletowner dropped in midstride.

  The Imperial officer waited, studying the valley, breathing deeply, and listening.

  After the silence had continued and when he had restored his own oxygen balance, he bent and checked the condition of the dark-haired boy.

  The youngster had moved slightly, and his breathing was returning to a pattern more like a deep sleep. Gerswin shook his head. Either the Impies or the shambletowners would have been under full stun for at least another hour.

  Slowly, he shouldered the boy’s form, nearly as light as the girl’s, then walked the several meters to recover her.

  With the double load, and with the fine drops of rain pelting on his head, his face, and shoulders, he concentrated on putting one foot in front of the other as he headed down the valley to his pick-up spot. His feet left deep marks in the clay, marks that were being erased by the light rain within minutes of his passing.

  He never looked back at the unmoving forms of the shambletowners. The coyotes might get them, and so might the rats. And they might not.

  His even steps brought him back down toward the rolling plain that eventually, kilometers eastward, would turn into a bla
ck quagmire, back toward the pick-up spot where his equipment was sealed into a stun-protected pack, and from where he would signal for a flitter.

  He sighed.

  A grim smile then flitted across his damp face, as the rainwind swirled about him and plastered down the tight blond curls of his hair.

  The two he had picked up would make it, Matsuko be damned. He suspected the others would as well, if he could keep them from destroying each other and the Impies who would have to guard them at first.

  If…If…If…

  He sighed again, but did not slow as he slogged downward through the wind and the rain.

  XXXVI

  Gerswin scanned the screen, studying the eight figures, all stretched on the flextile flooring. The cots were empty.

  Five young men, three women—the results of six months of preparation and two weeks of leave—waited like the caged animals they resembled.

  “Eight, Captain? Just eight who meet the minimums?”

  “That’s an estimate, Harl. Just an estimate.”

  Eight, thought Gerswin. Were eight all there were, or all he and Imperial technology could find and drag from the ruins of the planet?

  He took a deep breath.

  “Hold these, Harl.”

  He handed the weapons belt to the technician and palmed the portal release.

  “Ser! Clerris and N’gere are still recovering.”

  “I know. That’s why this is my job.”

  He eased inside the portal, waiting until it was securely closed behind him before moving farther into the converted dormitory.

  Quiet as he had been, the two figures closest to the portal rolled out of sleep and into a crouch.

  The first one to his feet was dark-eyed, with the shining depth of cat-eyes, dark-haired, and wore the tattered, raw, and uneven leathers and fur of the plains coyote. He was bareheaded and barefoot.

  The second slid to her feet with more grace, but just as swiftly. Instead of leathers, she wore the discarded sack trousers and jacket of a shambletowner. Green eyes burned under the short-hacked thatch of black hair.

  Gerswin stood there, barehanded, balanced, waiting for the attack he knew would come.

  The boy launched himself—a dark streak half invisible in the darkened room.

  With even greater speed, Gerswin stepped aside, letting his arms strike so swiftly that they never seemed to have moved from their half-raised position in front of him.

  Thud.

  The fall of the crumpled figure that had been Gerswin’s attacker shook the flextile floor.

  The girl pretended to look down and turn away, scuffed one bare foot on the smooth surface underfoot, then the other. A third scuff, and a fourth, followed, each one narrowing the distance between her and the I.S.S. officer, each one alerting the six others in the dormitory.

  Gerswin smiled, flicked his eyes to the still-slumped figure in the corner and back to the girl.

  “You lose, devilkid,” he observed.

  “No!”

  Again…Gerswin faced a dark streak, so quick that the men watching through the screens could not see what happened, only that the results were the same.

  Two figures lay beside each other in the corner to Gerswin’s left, both breathing, both stunned.

  The six others attacked—roughly together. Seven bodies merged and blurred, the motions so fast that the Service observers and outside sentries did not move, uncertain what to do next.

  Before they could decide, the chaos sorted itself out, with bodies falling and being thrown aside, until a single figure stood alone.

  Gerswin shuddered, took a deep breath, and wiped the blood off his forehead with the back of his right hand. His ribs ached again, and crisscrossing his forearms were a net of gouges. The blood continued to ooze from his forehead.

  He took three steps to his left and yanked the boy, his first attacker, into the air.

  The youngster’s eyes blazed, but he did not strike.

  “Devilkid you. Devilkid me.” Gerswin pinned the boy with his eyes as he spoke, although his attention was also on the seven others. “I talk. You follow. Stand? Stand clear?”

  He set the boy on his feet and turned away, toward the girl, listening for the possible signs of another attack.

  The whisper of a foot was enough.

  Like lightning, Gerswin whirled and struck, ducking under the streak of the other, planting a stiffened palm under the youth’s sternum, followed by an elbow across the jaw, and a sweep kick to leave an even more crumpled heap of devilkid.

  “Devilkids you. All devilkids. Head devilkid—me! I talk. You follow. Stand? Stand clear?”

  He grabbed the girl who had attacked second.

  “You stand?”

  “Stand.”

  Less than five standard minutes later, he stood in front of the eight—all eight—his back again to the portal, the blood still dripping from his forehead.

  “Teach you talk good. Teach you clean good. Teach you learn good. Stand?”

  “Teach us fight good?”

  “Learn good first. Then fight. Stand?”

  “Stand.”

  Gerswin went down the line, repeating the process with each one, forcing a commitment and a personal loyalty, which was all that could bind them now.

  “Be back. You wait. No fight.”

  Not one moved as he turned his back and walked out through the portal. Once he was gone, the eight approached each other warily.

  Outside, the two techs, the two sentries, and the sergeant of the guard stepped back as Gerswin moved away from the portal.

  “Long flight ahead, Harl.” There was a twist to his lips as he said it. “Long flight.”

  “Yes, ser.”

  “I’ll be at the flight surgeon’s, then over with Major Matsuko and the commander.”

  “Yes, ser.”

  “Don’t go in there. Not one of you. You wouldn’t last a minute.”

  “Yes, ser.”

  His quick steps echoed on the tile, then faded as he entered the tunnel.

  Finally, Harl cleared his throat.

  “Eight of them…like him?”

  “He’s better.”

  “Fine. Eight of them half as good as him?”

  The guard sergeant shook his head slowly. “They kept saying he was as good as a Corpus killer. They were wrong. He’s better, lots better. Lots better.”

  Harl looked at the corridor down which the captain had disappeared. “Who would believe it?”

  “That’s a weapon, too.”

  Harl screwed up his face as he wrestled with another question.

  “Why does he want them?”

  “Why did the commander let him round them up?”

  Harl frowned, then relaxed.

  “He has a reason for everything. He always does.”

  XXXVII

  About that tower of time on Old Earth where no towers exist? A metaphor, no doubt, but D’Lorina never makes that clear.

  A tower in the traditional sense would rear to the skies, but in the days of her mythical captain, for whom she presents a rather convincing case, by the way, nothing reared into the skies of Old Earth, and even the mountain tops were scoured lower by the stone rains and the landspouts.

  The only tower that she could refer to is the single building dating from that period, and it is less than a tower—far less. That building, and I use the term loosely, is the administration and operations bunker of the original Imperial Interstellar Survey Service. It is now preserved as a monument. A fortress of time would have been a far better metaphor, but precision in imagery was not the principal purpose of D’Lorina’s scholarship.

  She makes a convincing case that a captain, more likely a series of strong captains, existed, but it is doubtful that such a case could ever be completely verified or disproved, or that anyone living today could ever understand the darkness of that period, or unravel the darker secrets, or, if sane, would want to do so.

  Critiques of the Mythmakers

&
nbsp; Ereth A’Kirod

  New Avalon, 4541 N.E.C.

  XXXVIII

  The flitter touched down on the flat expanse of sand protruding from the purple-gray waters. The whine of the thrusters faded and was followed by a click as the canopy slid back.

  Two figures in coveralls emerged and dropped to the grayish sand, their knees and black flight boots vanishing in the mist that drifted above the waters and over the sandspit.

  With the dampness and the chill, with the gray mist and purpled water rippling solely from the tidal pressures beyond the delta, came the odor of death. Not the hot odor of death in the arena, nor the odor of hot metal and oiled death, nor the decay of swamps, nor even the moldiness of an ill-tended graveyard, but the metallic residue of death so long embalmed that only the inorganic heavy metals remain, those and the faintest whiff of past life.

  Gerswin turned to his left, toward a black shimmering stump with a single limb that rose three meters from the purple waters.

  “Maps say this was a heavily forested delta two thousand years back. Another century and it will be gone.”

  “Just kill-water,” answered the other. “Why show me? Kill-water is kill-water.”

  Gerswin shook his head, jabbed his left hand at the stump.

  “Didn’t have to be. Doesn’t have to be. We can change it. You can change it.”

  “Kill-water is kill-water.”

  The pilot snapped his head up in a single fluid motion to let both visors retract into the helmet housing. His hawk-yellow eyes caught the youth, slightly built like Gerswin himself, but with a fringe of dark hair showing beneath the back of his helmet.

  “I’m the captain, Lerwin. Captain. Life-water is what we need, and you’re going to New Augusta and Alphane and New Colora. You’re going, and you’re coming back. Life-water. That’s the reason. You forget, and I’ll chase you to the corners of the universe. Stand?”

  “Stand.”

  Gerswin did not contest the sullenness of the response, instead motioned to the flitter.

  The two figures climbed the recessed hand- and toeholds of the military craft and settled back into the cockpit. Within moments, the whine of the thrusters broke the stillness of mist and silent water, and the click of the closing canopy was lost in the power of the engines.