A Hero By Any Other Name
Edited by Jean Rabe
Cover by Denis Loubet
Interior Design by Michael A. Stackpole
Cover Design by Kat Klaybourne
Interior Art by Mark Dos Santos
Retreads © 2013 Aaron Allston
Stupendous Sparkle © 2013 Janine K. Spendlove
The Kid © 2013 Maxwell Alexander Drake
Changing the Game © 2013 Bryan Young
A Marvelous New World © 2013 Maggie Allen
All-Star © 2013 R.T. Kaelin
Hero Today, Gone Tomorrow © 2013 Ron Garner
Mortar's Ovation © 2013 Jean Rabe
Need to Know © 2013 Michael A. Stackpole
All rights reserved
No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means including information storage and retrieval systems without the permission in writing from the anthologist and the authors. The only exception is by a reviewer, who may quote short excerpts in a review.
Printed in the United States of America
First Printing: June 2013
These stories are works of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents either are the product of the authors' imaginations or used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business, companies, or events is entirely coincidental.
From
Retreads
Aaron Allston
The dog-man looked me straight in the eye and asked the kind of question Retreads just don’t ask one another. “You used to be Anvil, didn’t you?”
His voice, a canine half-growl, sounded nothing like the cheerful grumbly tones of talking dogs on TV cartoons, but at least there was no menace in it.
A fit-looking dog-man, he had German Shepherd coloration and pointy German Shepherd ears. He stood upright like a man but on backward-bending doggy legs. His arms were like a man’s, with proper human elbows, just with oversized hairy hands and black fingernails. His head was big enough to accommodate a human brain, and his muzzle was sized to keep those German Shepherd facial proportions correct. He towered over my 5'10" height, so he must have been 6'5" or more, and would have been even taller if he’d straightened his legs up to full extension.
And, I kid you not, he wore lederhosen—brown German leather shorts. His were held up by brown suspenders. Black carabineers hanging from attachment points up and down the suspenders held gear: compass, Swiss Army knife, whistle, stun gun, miniature walkie-talkie, nondescript black pouches of ballistic nylon.
Silence in the Library
Silence in the Library was founded by a group of authors with the lofty goal of reshaping the publishing industry, or at least our small corner of it. We seek to leverage the powerful tools and distribution networks universally available in twenty-first century publishing to ensure that all of the creative drivers, the authors, and artists, and graphic designers, and editors, involved in bringing a book to market have a substantive voice in the process. It is our firm belief that, as the rapidly changing publishing industry evolves, this will continue to be the correct path toward a quality product that keeps readers engaged and entertained.
This anthology is a product of our concept of how publishers, authors, and other creative drivers should work together. Most of the stories and illustrations you will find inside are the result of a collaborative effort to produce something that speaks to what readers desire in a manner that uplifts not only the readers, but all of those involved in bringing the book to them.
Please enjoy.
Acknowledgements
Silence in the Library would like to thank GAMA and Origins Game Fair for producing the Heroes! anthology for which A Hero By Any Other Name is envisioned as a companion piece. Each of the authors in this anthology also has works in Heroes!. We'd also like to thank Denis Loubet for the incredible cover art he produced for this anthology, and Mark Dos Santos for the amazing illustrations. Finally, we'd like to thank Jean Rabe for the application of her unparalleled editing skills and Michael Stackpole for his efforts in preparing the work for publication.
Retreads
A Story of the Strike Force Universe
Aaron Allston
One
The dog-man looked me straight in the eye and asked the kind of question Retreads just don’t ask one another. “You used to be Anvil, didn’t you?”
His voice, a canine half-growl, sounded nothing like the cheerful grumbly tones of talking dogs on TV cartoons, but at least there was no menace in it.
A fit-looking dog-man, he had German Shepherd coloration and pointy German Shepherd ears. He stood upright like a man but on backward-bending doggy legs. His arms were like a man’s, with proper human elbows, just with oversized hairy hands and black fingernails. His head was big enough to accommodate a human brain, and his muzzle was sized to keep those German Shepherd facial proportions correct. He towered over my 5'10" height, so he must have been 6'5" or more, and would have been even taller if he’d straightened his legs up to full extension.
And, I kid you not, he wore lederhosen—brown German leather shorts. His were held up by brown suspenders. Black carabineers hanging from attachment points up and down the suspenders held gear: compass, Swiss Army knife, whistle, stun gun, miniature walkie-talkie, nondescript black pouches of ballistic nylon.
That was all he wore, lederhosen and suspenders. I thought the outfit desperately called for a little Alpine hat.
I pretended not to hear the question. I just gave him a dubious look as I grabbed one of the curved vertical braces that kept the cargo bay’s skin in its rigid shape. I used my chin to press the radio button on the inside of my helmet. “Estrada aboard and ready.”
“Welcome aboard. Stand by to lift.” The pilot was forward, beyond the closed cockpit door, out of my sight. Her voice, brisk and professional, suggested that it didn’t bother her that her three passengers were loose cannons capable of casually toppling the government of a colony world like this one.
The ramp I’d just walked up to enter the flatblimp’s cargo bay rose, cutting off my view of the grassy landing field, becoming the bay’s rear bulkhead. The whine of lifting motors cut out the instant the metal plate clanked into place. Other motors roared into life, one by one, four of them.
Then we lurched and were airborne, the roar of those outboard propeller engines rising in volume.
The dog-man swayed where he stood, but didn’t grab anything for support. He turned to the third passenger, who’d gripped another brace the instant we launched. The dog-man raised his growl to be heard over the propeller roar. “And you used to be Psiren.”
No, he didn’t pronounce the letter “p,” but I knew how the woman’s code-name was spelled. I’d never met her on Earth or elsewhere, but I remembered her from her brief singing-and-crime fighting career. I gave her a closer look.
She had the kind of skin tone people tend to describe as “mocha,” and looked to be twenty-five, though true age had become impossible to gauge by sight in the years since the genetic-engineering explosion of the nineties introduced all those long-life gene strains into the population. Not that there weren’t plenty already coming out of mutant families like mine. I was more than fifty, but I looked thirty.
This woman had brown-black hair in a braid down her back and chocolate-colored eyes. Her features were kind of exotic, not so much African-American or African-African as African-Egyptian, as if she’d inherited them from an elegant N
ubian queen of ancient times. She would have been pretty hot had her face offered the slightest spark of emotion, but she was deadpan, remote.
I didn’t know what to expect her to look like now. I’d owned some of the music CDs of her singing trio, Triplight, back in the nineties, when she and her partners were teenagers. On the CD covers she’d looked ridiculously happy, wearing abbreviated dresses that seemed to be made up more of sparkle than cloth.
I remember hearing about Triplight breaking up, and about hard times that had followed: failed solo careers, rehab, reality shows.
Like me, the woman was dressed for this operation in a silver-gray jumpsuit—fire-resistant metal cloth sandwiching layers of insulating polymers—with the letters RTRDS in black on the chest.
A coupling ring at the suit’s neckline would allow use of a helmet like the one I already wore. Its adjustable-polarization visor made up most of the front half, gray metal on top gave it a bullet shape, and more curved gray metal and rebreather-hose connectors made up the back. The woman held her helmet in one hand. Like me, she already wore on her back the flat rebreather unit that would supply her with increasingly stale air if the surroundings got too fiery.
She looked a lot better than I did in the gear; she was shaped like a medium-tall track and field athlete while I was shaped like a fire plug who’d been through years of bodybuilding.
She hesitated just a moment before answering the dog-man. “It’s just Hathor now. Hathor Winn.” Her voice was controlled, unemotive.
“These days, I’m just Miguel Estrada. Mike.” I put out my hand to the dog-man, and my internal filter failed me; I couldn’t help myself. “Shake.”
The dog-man didn’t rise to the bait. He just shook my hand. “Conrad Schwarz.”
I was lucky; he didn’t have a German accent, at least not one I could detect under the growl, so I managed to avoid bursting into laughter.
Hathor kept her attention on Conrad. “This is your first time, isn’t it?” Her tone didn’t sound accusing.
Conrad nodded. “On a Retreads operation, yes.”
“Then why are you in charge?”
He shrugged—a weird-looking gesture from a half-man, half-dog. “Luck of the draw, I suppose. A normal rotation?”
Hathor looked at me, and I looked back at her. There was no way a first-timer should have been put in charge of an op like this. Oh, a milk run, sure, but not a mission where more than a hundred lives might be at stake. I’d been on a dozen Retreads operations over the past few years, on three different worlds; if Hathor didn’t have an even more extensive resume, I should have been mission leader.
I wasn’t offended. I didn’t really care. I was just curious.
I let go of the brace and turned to kneel over the equipment pack the supply guys had set out for me. There was nothing in the cargo bay but tie-ropes and netting lashed to the braces, no seats or tables, so the pack just lay on the deck. About the size of a small bookcase, made of the same metal material as our jumpsuits, attached to a rigid metal frame like serious hikers and campers wore, it weighed about a quarter ton, or so I estimated as I moved it around. I’d arrived late enough that I wasn’t familiar with its contents, so I got to work correcting that problem.
Occupying most of the pack’s interior was another mass of metal cloth, this one folded and strapped into a rigid rectangle. I recognized it as a survival tent with an integrated rebreather layer. It wouldn’t allow someone in the fire zone to survive overnight when closely surrounded by flame, but it could provide a few minutes of shelter and air, plus it was easy to see. It would be especially easy to spot when its occupants deployed its built-in tethered signal balloon. A flatblimp or helicopter with the right hooking rig could fly up, snag the balloon’s cable, and give the tent’s occupants a jolting, terrifying flight to safety. The tent and its poles accounted for more than half the pack’s weight.
There were also a professional-grade chemical fire extinguisher, a mil-spec field radio in a hardshell case, a medical kit, food, water, a flare pistol, climbing gear, cord, a sonic saw, a data tablet, a fire axe... a pretty good kit overall. I decided that the Black Forest Retreads office had its act together.
While I did my inventory, Conrad paced, managing without trouble the occasional swaying of the flatblimp, and talked. “Why do you think the settlers didn’t answer? Didn’t report the fire surrounding them?”
I shrugged. “Cult leader.”
“Eh?”
“Probably one of those walled-compound towns whose founder and mayor is some sort of charismatic whack job. The fire sprang up when the stars were aligned just right, so he or she decided it was the apocalypse foretold by wise ghostly gummi bears. Right now, this idiot has all the settlers huddled up in a warehouse, praying for mercy while the leader says, ‘Anyone who violates my orders, I shoot in the head.’”
Conrad frowned at me. His eyebrows, like a dog’s, were very expressive. “That’s a very cynical thought, isn’t it?”
I tied down the main flap of my pack. “I’ve seen too many of these little settlements. With lots of them, the population consists of one forceful nut job and a few dozen human sheep.”
“Then why do you bother to rescue them?”
I grinned and stood. “Family tradition, I guess. Several supers in my line and not much to show for it. Cousin Rudy from Nogales was one of Vulcan’s power armor goons. Code-name Carnelian. He was one of the guys who died in the Kilauea eruption in Seventy-Five. Cousin Ricky was El Toro Negro, a luchador hero in Juarez. Made a few citizen’s arrests and died young.” I shrugged. “I’m what’s left. If history is going to remember the Estrada mutants, it ought to be for rescuing dumbass settlers and getting kittens out of trees, not for helping Vulcan try to conquer the Pacific Rim.”
Hathor, in the process of attaching the metallic hoses from her rebreather to the ports on the back of her helmet, gave me a look. “But you don’t like what you’re doing.”
“Sure I do. I just don’t like seeing people make the same mistakes over and over. And over. And over.” I leaned back against the fuselage and crossed my arms. “Do you?”
She ignored the question. She donned her helmet, setting it in her docking ring with the visor an eighth of a turn counterclockwise, then turned it in the ring until it locked into place. She lowered her visor, and a moment later I heard her over my helmet speakers, doing a radio check with the cockpit.
Conrad just kept pacing.
Ever seen a flatblimp? If you’re from Earth, of course you have, and you can find them on about half the colony worlds, but there are places where they haven’t shown up.
Take a gondola kind of like you find on a blimp. The bigger flatblimps have bigger gondolas, like you’d find on zeppelins in the first half of the 20th century.
Attach outrigger struts to hold propeller engines, one or two engines on either side, as if held on by wings that are just wire-frames.
Now, on top, instead of a gas bag, attach a flat, oval metal grate half again the length and width of the gondola-and-propellers structure. The grate is horizontal to the ground, and is actually an antigrav lift unit, using the same technology that does first-stage hauling of payloads from groundside to low planetary orbit all over Earth-settled space. It’s a grate so it won’t be as much of a sail—cross-winds hitting the plate are much less likely to affect the flatblimp in a meaningful way.
Flatblimps are slow and stable. The ones with quieter engines are good for relaxed vacation trips. Louder ones are fine for crop dusting, peacetime aerial reconnaissance, and hauling heavy cargos where there are no roads or waterways. Neither kind requires an airstrip to land on—just a city park, an empty lot, or a sturdy flat rooftop.
Conrad, Hathor and I rode in a smaller flatblimp, thirty feet long and forty wide, not including the antigrav grate, and the green-and-black paint job on its exterior marked it as property of a civilian branch of the Black Forest planetary government. Clearly, the Rescue & Transport Rapid Deployment Service off
ice here didn’t have enough resources for one of its own.
It was only half an hour before the pilot came over the intercom. “We’ll be putting down in five minutes. We’ll only be on the ground long enough to offload you.”
Conrad didn’t answer, so I spoke up. “Five minutes, heard.” I hefted my giant backpack and slid my arms through the straps, then buckled the cross-strap in front and tightened everything. The pack pressed my rebreather into my back, but it wasn’t uncomfortable for me. Say what you will about super-strength, the longest-recognized, best-understood, and probably dullest superpower, it sure came in handy at times.
I glanced at Hathor. Radio and rebreather checks complete, donning her own, much smaller backpack over her rebreather, she now had her helmet visor up. She glanced back at me the same instant. I’d noticed she always did that. This and her old code-name told me most of what I needed to know about her powers, even though I knew almost nothing about her from her Triplight days. She always knew when someone was looking at her, didn’t shake hands, kept herself under constant rigid control... we were talking about a psychic, probably both telepathic and touch-cognitive. I’d seen the behavior pattern lots of times.
The flatblimp, now angled for descent, began hitting pockets of turbulence—some of them bone-rattlers. The first bad one caught Hathor by surprise and nearly threw her to the deck, but Conrad caught her before she hit. He let her go as soon as she had a grip on a brace. Me, I just kept a two-finger grip on my original brace and ignored the shaking.
The cargo bay didn’t have windows, so we were down before I knew we were landing, one last big shake I mistook for turbulence. The engine roar muted a little, the pilot announced “Retreads, prepare to exit,” and the rear ramp lowered.
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