A Hero By Any Other Name

by Stackpole, Michael A.

  I shook that last thought away. I didn’t want to go there.

  Hathor took the doll. She flinched just a little. “Her name is Dianita but they call her Dita.”

  I raised an eyebrow. “The doll?”

  “The girl who owns her. The doll’s name is Little Dee. Dita is four and a half.” Hathor said it with a child’s emphasis, that touch of pride that marks the importance of those extra six months of life. “Dita loves Little Dee.”

  “Then why is Little Dee here? Did Dita lose it?”

  Hathor shook her head, unsure. “What I was just telling you was all reinforced across months of handling. Dita only left the doll a few hours ago. Leaving her was the act of an instant, not enough time to embed memories or emotions.”

  Conrad looked back the way he’d come. “So they evacuated north.”

  I frowned at him. “That makes no sense. Even if they’d left town northward, they would have cut west as soon as possible. West, where the forest is thinnest, in the direction of the nearest towns. They would have been spotted already by flatblimp crews or recon drones. North, the forest continues for fifty miles or more up the valley.”

  He shrugged. “Electromagnetic pulse beams make no sense here, either.”

  “Point conceded.”

  “I’m going north. If it makes so little sense to you that you can’t stand it, call for extraction.”

  I bristled, but Hathor spoke first. “I’m with you.” She tucked the doll into her own backpack. “Shouldn’t we call our status in to the Retreads office?”

  I shook my head. “If Mister Big is still in the area, he might hear our transmission. Let’s not give up the element of surprise just yet. Assuming we still have it.”

  We headed north.

  The fire was unbroken across the treeline beyond that edge of town. The tracks of Dalton Valley’s population paralleled the muddy creek bed, maybe twenty yards west of it. Here, many yards short of the fire, the mud in the creek had baked dry and had begun cracking.

  As we neared the treeline, Conrad and Hathor began to look reluctant. Me, I could feel the increase in heat, too, but it didn’t make me uncomfortable. It didn’t even make me sweat. Given a reliable supply of air, I could wander around happily in hard vacuum, ocean depths, or forest fires.

  Which might cause you to ask, why was I bothering with a fire suit at all? The answer was propriety. The clothes under the jumpsuit weren’t fireproof. Oh, the civilian settlers wouldn’t initially protest being rescued by a Mexican muscleman wearing nothing but a layer of ash, but afterward the mommies and daddies might be offended that their kids had gotten a more startling lesson in human anatomy than the parents had planned. I hated being sued.

  I told Hathor and Conrad to wait a few minutes. I shucked my pack, closed my visor, pressed the “on” button at the top of my rebreather unit, and walked into the burning treeline. I immediately lost sight of the settlers’ footprints, most of which had probably burned away with fallen leaves and underbrush, so I drifted right until I came within sight of the comparatively easy-to-see line the dry creek bed constituted.

  The creek bed ran north with fire right along either side of it for a couple of hundred yards. Then the fire wasn’t so close on either side—it was forty or fifty yards off in either direction, creeping slowly toward the creek. The green thermometer reading on the heads-up display inside my visor told me the air around me was hot but not life-threatening to a normal human. And just beyond that point, I could see where feet, human feet in shoes and boots, had left off walking among the trees and descended into the creek bed. From there they had continued northward in the creek mud, churning it up in their passage.

  So fire on either side had kept the settlers moving north. At a certain point, the settler leader had told everybody to march in the creek bed itself—maybe because it was a little cooler, or because it was easier to see, or because channeling everyone along a depressed trail with slick, sloping sides made it harder for children to wander off.

  First, we drive them from their homes in fear of their lives. Their prayers are in vain ...

  Jolted, I spun, looking for the speaker of those words, but there was no person to see, just muddy ditch and doomed trees.

  Besides, the voice seemed to be in my head, not in my ears. There was only muted static coming over my radio, and I left it on receive-only when I spoke. “Hathor?” But the voice had been male in its pitch and tone, smug and humorous rather than emotionless like hers. And Hathor didn’t answer.

  Was it another telepath? Maybe, but it actually felt more like a memory than a sending.

  Memories... For decades, there had been no point in remembering anything from Juarez, where I spent the first twenty-seven years of my life, so I was out of practice. I decided to stay out of practice. I turned back toward the settlement.

  I marched out of the burn zone, rejoined Hathor and Conrad, and explained what I’d seen—omitting the bit about the voice. Meanwhile, I unloaded my backpack. “Conrad, you’ll never get through the fire, deep as it is, and Hathor, you might get through, but you’d probably get poached pretty good.” I replaced everything in the pack, tent poles included, except for the survival tent itself. This I partially unfolded on the ground, ending up with a multi-layered stretch of metallic cloth maybe six feet wide and twelve long.

  Hathor nodded. “I get it. We climb in between the folds and you drag it through the fire.”

  “Right.” I donned my backpack again; its weight was reduced by more than half with the tent gone. “Conrad, if you can stand the smell of smoke, you might want to hyperventilate for a minute here. You’ll want to hold your breath as long as possible while I’m dragging you.”

  So that’s what we did. Moving backward at a near-trot, I dragged the thing along the creek bed, the lumps that were Conrad and Hathor occasionally making “Oof” noises as they scraped over rocks or tree roots. But I got them past the burn zone in a little over a minute. They emerged unscorched, if you don’t count the bruises Conrad rubbed at on his body and Hathor affected to ignore on hers.

  The tent, however, was a loss. The material was torn or ripped in places where it had snagged on sharp projections. It wasn’t of much use as a tent any more. I left it where it lay, dropping its poles atop it. We headed up the creek.

  When we could—when the bank was clear enough of trees to permit passage—we walked beside the creek. Just as often the trees and sometimes the fire were close enough that we had to descend into the mud. Walking there was hard slogging. Even with the tent gone, me plus my pack still massed five hundred pounds or so, meaning my feet sank deep into the mud with every step. Conrad, built to run, clearly hated being impeded by the mud, plus he was barefoot. Hathor did all right, and stepped gingerly from creek rock to rock whenever the opportunity presented itself, but it was obvious that constant exertion in a hot environment and in that insulated suit, even with her visor up and gloves off, was taking a toll on her. She perspired constantly now, and took frequent drinks from the water bottle in her pack.

  All the while they moved, Hathor and Conrad were like sensor devices, her an acoustic dish and him a camera, their heads turning back and forth as they kept alert for the settlers. Me, I stayed alert for the fire and Mister Big.

  I also kept mistaking tapnut cluster explosions for small-arms fire. Not that I felt the urge to dive for safety; my skin could bounce anything short of 30mm HEAP shells. But Hathor and Conrad kept flinching during those first few miles.

  I haven’t described the trees, but they were important to what was going on.

  There aren’t any Schwarz-Wiley taptree forests on Earth. The homeworld doesn’t need them. Designed by mad botanical geneticists, they look kind of like the pecan trees from which they were engineered, except that the pecan-sized nuts on them grow in loose clusters the size of basketballs.

  The trees grow five or six times as fast as most nut tree species. Their root systems are especially thick and include one really aggressive tap
root. Taptrees don’t reproduce without help; their nuts are infertile without the right chemical push from the right mad-science lab. And the trees live mostly on stone minerals, carbon dioxide, water, and sunlight.

  So on a world you’re terraforming, you use lab-fertilized tapnuts to seed a sterile desert or stone shelf a few hundred square miles in size, situated over a water table. The trees grow, sending their taproots down through stone to water, while the main root system, also very hardy, chews the bedrock all to hell. A few years later, you add lots of beneficial insect species. After twenty years or so, the taptrees finish their accelerated life cycles and die. Unless preserved within a few months by resins, dead taptrees dehydrate and start to crumble, flaking away into nutrients useful for planting different crops. Whoever is in charge of the land can decide to plant new taptrees and continue the process of improving the soil, or get right to work planting grain crops, themselves engineered to survive in unpromising, stony soil.

  So in a single human generation, bedrock plains become forest, then start to become arable, if very rocky, land.

  Taptrees were only one tool of the terraformer. There were competing bioengineered methods, but I liked taptrees. Unlike stone-digesting Gainer Genetics lichens and Chloro fungi, you could climb them, rest in their shade, use tapnuts in countless recipes. A variant form of taptree lived a lot longer and was less destructive, making it ideal for forests and orchards meant to last a while.

  That’s what I was thinking about when the answer came to me. Not the solution to the mystery of the evacuated town. The mystery of Conrad.

  I said it out loud. “Schwarz-Wiley Industries. Conrad Schwarz.”

  Walking ahead of me, his doglike recurve legs slurping along the mud, Conrad didn’t answer. But his ears went down.

  “That’s why you’re in charge of this op. I bet you’re the richest man on Black Forest. I bet you funded the whole planetary branch of the Retreads.”

  “Something like that.” His voice was low, barely audible over the burning of the trees in the near distance.

  “And that means ...” That’s when my blood ran cold.

  Actually, I shouldn’t say that sort of thing. With as genetically diverse a species as humans had become, there were people whose blood actually did run cold. Not to mention vampires. I’d met some Mexican lady vampires who were hot only in appearance and manner. So my blood actually didn’t run cold, but that’s what it felt like when I realized what Conrad was.

  Schwarz-Wiley was financed in part by money inherited from the biomedical inventor Felipe Villalobos, code-named Blanco. He’d been the longtime head of R&D for the Reapers, an organization so nasty that a century of constant effort still hadn’t quite killed it. Among a thousand other sins, Blanco had designed the Animal Kingdom, genetic chimeras, part human and part animal, sold as shock troops to masterminds as nasty as Blanco himself.

  The realization made my voice go gentler. “So you’re one of Blanco’s designs.”

  He still didn’t look back, but he snorted out a little laugh and then answered. “Worse. I’m one of his designs ... and one of his sons.”

  I kept quiet for a while after that and decided to bite down on any more doggy jokes.

  Three

  Along a stretch where the fire had closed to within feet of the creek bank on either side, we came to a spot where a thick tree had fallen across the creek, half-breaking in the middle, sagging at the break in such a way that nothing larger than a housecat could squeeze through the gaps beneath it. Fire rose in a sheet across the tree’s upper surface, creating a wall of fire Conrad and Hathor wouldn’t be able to cross. I dropped my visor into place, re-started my rebreather, left my companions behind, and moved up to deal with the obstacle.

  With a few blows I finished breaking it in the middle and then shoved the two halves away from the mud. I noticed that the tree’s root system, on the creek’s right bank, had been half pulled up when it fell.

  With the fiery stuff shoved back a barely-safe distance, I raised my visor and studied the roots. The tree hadn’t been dead when it toppled.

  When the others rejoined me, Hathor was the first to speak. “Someone’s trying to slow us down.”

  I shook my head. “Mister Big would know that first responders wouldn’t be slowed much by one burning tree. This was a barrier to keep the settlers from coming back along the creek. The settlers are being driven.”

  Hathor looked northward at the muddy track left by the settlers. “Why?”

  “I don’t know, but this whole setup is weirdly familiar. Like something I heard about long ago.” Okay, maybe I deserved a chewing out for not mentioning the voice I’d heard or remembered. But I wasn’t exactly the first guy to get privacy conscious when there was a telepath around. And if that voice was a memory, I wanted to root it out myself, not invite a telepath to pry it out for me.

  I was having trouble focusing on it, though. Every time I tried, I’d be distracted by thoughts of the doll now in Hathor’s backpack.

  We continued north. A while later, we came to a spot where the creek cut through a broad natural clearing. The fire hadn’t consumed the clearing yet, hadn’t even reached the trees surrounding it. At its center, we could gulp air that was a little cooler.

  Conrad trotted around the stony clearing, trying to keep upwind of drifting smoke. He came back with a worn-out baseball glove and a squeezed-empty tube of disinfectant. “They stopped here to rest. We are catching up to them ... just very slowly. At our current rate, we might reach them a couple of hours after nightfall.”

  I grimaced. He was talking about five or six more hours of mud-slogging travel.

  Hathor was looking weary. I pointed to the creek bank. “Ten minutes’ rest. Then we should be on our way again.”

  Conrad looked at me. “I should be saying that.”

  “No offense, but yes, you should.” I shucked my pack, helmet, and rebreather, and sat down against the creek bank. I closed my eyes and zoned out.

  I was really good at zoning out. Hard-working, and doing mostly manual labor for the last quarter-century, I’d gotten proficient at making good use of every rest opportunity.

  Usually, zoning was restful. But this time, Dita’s doll, with its floppy arms and legs, hanging limp in Conrad’s big hand, hovered in front of my mind’s eye. And then, though I didn’t know why, my mind went someplace I never, ever wanted it to go.

  To December, 1987, Juarez, Chihuahua, Mexico. My one-time home.

  In those days, Juarez and El Paso, Texas, across the river, pretty much constituted one city, population about two million. Most of the residents were normal people. There were also a half-dozen non-powered or low-powered costumed vigilante crime-fighters, mostly luchadores, including my cousin Ricky, with full-face masks and wrestlers’ tights, bare chested.

  Then there was me, Anvil, the only Juarez resident who wore a costume with a shirt. I was also the only one who could bite the ends off steel I-beams, bounce bullets off his earlobes, and push-start a mile-long freight train.

  Your ears probably pricked up when you heard the date. Even if you’re not old enough to remember those events, that’s a date they teach in schools. Yeah, 1987 was the start of World War III, and the basic details they teach in school are correct.

  High-tech air forces of Aswar the Darklord, ruler of big chunks of the otherdimensional Chaos Zone, came popping through dimensional gates. They carpet-bombed national capitals and military bases worldwide, crippling Earth’s military response ability within three days. Conquest was what they had in mind, but they intended to soften us up for quite a while before they began landing troops.

  Juarez and El Paso didn’t fare badly at first. Next door, the installations at Fort Bliss and, beyond it, White Sands Missile Range got blown all to hell. But the civilian population was largely unhurt.

  I worked hard to make sure it stayed that way. Like a big bald pest control expert in a stretchy costume, I kept the numbers of enemy aircraft down by fli
nging manhole covers, carburetors and engine blocks from junked-out cars, and chunks of sidewalk up into the air to smash them. By the second day, residents on both sides of the river were delivering me stuff to throw, including one survivalist who gave me his precious stock of cannonballs. I had a good pitching arm, too, developed while playing baseball before my powers manifested. The same day I received the cannonballs, a guy who’d competed in the 1984 Olympics came out to show me how to do shot put and throw the discus properly. Footage of me taking down plane after plane was all over the news.

  Then, on Day Four of the war, the bomb fell on us.

  Not a conventional explosive. Not a nuclear bomb. News recordings retrieved much later showed it as a silvery globe, size of a big beach ball, lying cracked in the middle of a residential street in Juarez, a few ounces of green scum inside it evaporating into the morning air. It had probably been dropped the night before. Children played around it for hours before it was noticed. Its origin as an alien object of war wasn’t recognized. City sanitation workers carted it off.

  After an incubation period of about two days, the symptoms hit—fever, convulsions, dementia, tachycardia. Then victims started dying, their brains cooked, their hearts giving out—children and the elderly dying within a day, people in very good shape lasting up to a week. They died delirious, in pain, and the virus was incredibly contagious.

  How many victims were there? Just two at first—Juarez and El Paso. Two million dead in two weeks. Another million in surrounding areas by two weeks later, and outbreaks detected elsewhere in the southern U.S. and northern Mexico.

  The virus was 100% fatal among humans—among normal humans.

  But ever since, at the age of fifteen, all my hair had fallen out and my tissue density began to increase, I wasn’t completely human. I came down with a full-blown case of the Juarez Plague, too ... and survived it, untreated. My heart just didn’t give out. My nervous system didn’t fail.