Tomorrow’s Heritage

by Juanita Coulson

  No options. Todd thought of the city he had known in his youth. The ship’s programs couldn’t help. They hadn’t been set up for these maps. Recall and instinct would have to do the job.

  A blackened series of towers flashed by on his right. Memories clicked. A collection of dishes and antennae had once blossomed on those roofs, part of Ward’s original ComLink Corporation. The landmark gave Todd confidence. He hardly reacted when another energy bolt lanced by. Its strength was attenuated, proof he was putting considerable distance between himself and his pursuers.

  Braced for the upcoming turn, he leaned into the bank, nearly rolling the flier. The little aircraft peeled hard. Todd forced himself to keep off the retros as a skyscraper kissed paint from the flier’s undercarriage.

  He gave it a count of three, then leveled. Then he dived. The abandoned street was narrow, deeply shadowed, and thick with fog which rose from the ruins below. Todd stood on the foot brace, resisting the gees. That wasn’t Caribbean surf down there, but rubble and an unforgiving pavement. He searched through the darkness, his nav guides probing, the greenish glow of their readouts lighting the cockpit eerily. Todd cut his running idents to try to hide himself.

  They were tracking him, of course. Anybody with a military override scrambler system would certainly have full tracking scan ability. They would home in on Todd’s own circuitry output.

  That meant he needed a mask. Where? The streets helped. They were crooked and pinched with dozens of right angles and erratic intersections suitable for putting buildings between him and a clear signal contact. Each dart into a bolt-hole, though, was a replay of that harrowing swerve which had led him into this abandoned section of the southern city. Todd balanced the craft expertly, appreciating anew the flier’s superb handling. He abused its structural integrity again and again.

  The flier’s warning systems chattered, picking out radiation spots. His ship didn’t like those. Neither would the attackers’. Standard shielding could serve all three of them only for a short period. But compared with a direct weapon hit, old, weakened radiation was a small worry.

  Todd flew still lower. Rubble rose in stories-high heaps. Broken windows glared at him. Jagged ruins of penthouses loomed above. He was so far down in the bowels of the empty city that a fine, dirty mist filled the air everywhere. It bred in the accumulated garbage at street level.

  Vision was severely limited, but he didn’t dare rely too much on his instruments. Todd swiped irritably at the condensation forming on his windows. Then he spotted another cramped intersection amid the gloom and hurtled into it.

  He almost couldn’t complete the maneuver.

  Smoke-scarred brick and the gaping teeth of shattered window-walls rose out of the fog like nightmares. Collision point, dead ahead!

  Somehow, he kept himself calm. Todd tapped the retros delicately, avoiding a fatal yaw. The brief burst of braking fire spilled over the dirty bricks and through the broken windows. The flier skidded wildly, scraping something hard and unyielding.

  Only a moment . . . and then he was free, moving clear, still banked over on his side, whistling down a snaky alleyway. Todd exulted, too in love with flying to be afraid.

  Amazing himself, he righted the flier, slumping heavily against his safety webbing. He switched to manual on the com. He couldn’t break past their override, but maybe they would start talking to each other at a range close enough for him to hear them.

  If he could find the alien messenger’s signal in the infinite reaches of space, he ought to be able to locate those bastards following him. They probably had a multi-system, Todd speculated, remembering the military specs he had read to update his knowledge after the shuttle ride to Goddard. Okay, that meant they would be using an unusual frequency for their two-way com between each other, to coordinate their attack. He rejected the normal frequencies, hunting, hoping they were too busy hunting him to notice that he was eavesdropping once he did find the frequency.

  They weren’t very imaginative. Far end of the band. Static clearing, words coming through. Todd pounced on the setting. He had them!

  “. , . no more full fire. Risky . . .”

  Were they afraid a lot of firepower might be detected on CNAU Enforcement’s scanners, or what?

  “Over. He’s in here someplace. Where’s he going . . . ?”

  Todd grinned cockily for the first time since the hair-raising encounter had begun. He blocked the output feed so they couldn’t hear him and muttered nastily, “Where you’re not going to find me, you son of a bitch.”

  The sooty mist opened a trifle. The alleyway was ending. Not good. Ahead lay a wide street. That would cancel out the maneuvering advantage of his small flier and let them get a straight shot.

  Then Todd’s attention was caught by black maws high along the sides of the skyscrapers lining the avenue, Missing windows had left entire floors of the old structures open to the elements. Hundreds of them, like lofty steel and glass caves, beckoned the fugitive. Nav scans told Todd that the craft were coming after him low. He cut everything but motive power, and the screens went dark. He was blind, and so were his attackers if they tried to track him.

  He climbed, navigating eyeball mode, lifting above the alley buildings before he merged with the avenue. The flier spanned the wreck-littered four lanes and kept climbing. Wiping more condensation off the windows, Todd burst free above the mist.

  There! That one! He couldn’t say what made him select that particular ruin. Intuition? He swung over hard, not cutting speed. He didn’t dare lose it now, or he would be splattered all over the side of the building. He flew through the center of an immense, broken window-wall and simultaneously hit retros full.

  The interior wall rushed toward him. Retro fire billowed along his glide path like a blue-white carpet. The little flier slued and began to roll, the left wing tip aimed at the floor. He was split-seconds away from an out-of-control cartwheel.

  The awful moment lasted forever. Todd leaned back and right, hard. Then the skids came down, scraping, braking . . .

  Forward motion ceased.

  The flier was at rest, upright, and intact, turned on its axis to parallel the interior wall and the window. Todd hastily completed the crippling of his ship, cutting all power.

  He sat very still. His breathing sounded unnaturally loud. He could hear blood rushing through his temples and ears, too. Only now was he aware of these physical sensations, his body protesting what he had put it through. Todd felt sick and hoped he wasn’t going to throw up. After a few seconds, the nausea settled to a bearable level and he peered out at his surroundings.

  The burned-out floor he had picked as a haven was cavernous, low-ceilinged, and dark. The only light came through the broken window-wall. Todd cracked the canopy slightly and listened. There were dripping noises, possibly from broken conduits and condensation falling from the ceiling. Then he heard the distinctive high-pitched whine of flier thrusters.

  How many? One, or two? He tried to gauge speed and distance from the sounds. Without his accustomed electronic tools, he was thrown back into the more primitive era of hunter-and-quarry flying.

  The whining dopplered. Immediately afterward, another power system’s sound rose in pitch, then dropped abruptly as a second craft flew past the skyscraper. They weren’t flying at his story level, Todd guessed. Lower, but not by too many stories.

  In a few minutes, they came back. Search pattern. That wasn’t very encouraging. How long were they going to hunt him? And how thoroughly?

  Todd flexed his shoulders and twisted his stiffening neck. It would be nice if Dian were here to soothe away the tenseness. With a rueful smile, Todd realized he was going to be a lot later picking her up at the shuttle terminal than he had anticipated.

  His hand was resting on his thigh. Suddenly, Todd became conscious that he was touching the decoder strip Gib Owens had given him. He sat up very straight, blinking, and took the key out of his pocket. He stared at the darkened com panel.

  Sc
rambler lock. They didn’t expect him to have one. They hadn’t bothered to use one themselves. Either they hadn’t cared if he overheard them, or they assumed he would be too stupid to eavesdrop successfully.

  Todd cursed himself for not having remembered the key earlier. Fumbling in the semi-darkness, he fed the decoder into the com’s translator slot. The thing would work as well here—in reverse!—as it had in his office. Gingerly, he cued the com. The faint green glow seemed like a cheery electronic campfire, holding back the jungle.

  He had contact. And the com’s readout reassured Todd he was safely hidden behind a masking wall of static.

  “. . . couldn’t have made it over to the Inlet.”

  “How did he get away? That bastard sure can fly . . .”

  “We gotta report . . .”

  Report? To whom? Todd’s growing curiosity was chasing his shivers and nausea into oblivion. He studied the hateful voices. Neutral inflection, like ComLink’s media ‘casters and entertainers. You had to train to achieve that sort of voice. The pilots could be from anywhere. They were talking in English, but there was no ethnic or regional tone at all in their words.

  “. . . must have cut his systems. There’s nothing registering,” one of those flat voices complained.

  Todd smiled. Damned right he had cut his systems, except for the scramble-locked com! And he didn’t intend to fire up again until those predators were out of his range.

  “Look, we have to find him, at least confirm he didn’t ident us . . .”

  “He didn’t. Hell, we did the job . . .”

  Todd strained to hear. The whining of their engines was gone. They must be prowling other streets now, still hunting. If only they would let something slip! A name. A takeoff point. Anything!

  “Gave him a scare . . .”

  “That’s all we were supposed to do. They said spook him, scare him off . . .”

  They? Who were they? A fake! A phony attack! They had never meant to kill him at all, just scare him off. Off from what?

  Todd hated his immobility, wanting to strike back and shake the answers out of them. Who the hell wanted him scared badly enough to stage that risky aerial chase? He could have been killed, despite the intentions of the pilots!

  “. . . prefer a clean job, like that Spacer pilot. That’s one of them we won’t have to worry about any more . . .”

  What? Whom were they talking about now?

  “. . . go home. Saunder’ll report this to Enforcement. They’ll hunt around and file it and forget it . . .”

  The signals moved rapidly. Todd boosted gain, wanting to capture every scrap of information he could. He switched on navs, knowing now that they weren’t going to track him back via his circuitry and kill him, as he had believed they would. He swore at his having been duped. They were drifting off the navs. Could he fire up and hope to catch them? Todd checked the readout, knowing there was no chance.

  The voices were fading, other signals cutting in as static.

  “. . . lose bet . . . other team bragging . . . got Owens on that African transp . . .”

  Icy shock dashed away Todd’s anger. Gib Owens? Dead?

  The signal was almost gone. He boosted gain to max.imum, hanging on as long as he could.

  “. . . fucking Colonists. Won’t . . . no slipping that one past us again . . .”

  “. . . too bad about the civilians . . . Spacer’s fault sent him . . . should have known we’d . . .”

  There was nothing there but static. They had the range to cross the continent in those ships. They had left to report their successful “scare mission” to an unspecified “they.” Todd switched to a commercial frequency. A newscast was in progress. Absently, he removed the scrambler lock and replaced it in his pocket.

  “. . . no survivors. The Nairobi shuttle, with three-hundred-twenty passengers and crew, went down without contacting Global Flight Control. Sea-Search Rescue Director Capra speculated that equipment failure may have been the probable cause of the crash. A more complete analysis is expected when Protectors of Earth’s seabed salvage teams recover the wreckage from the ocean south of the Cape Verde Islands. All indications are that no lifesaving gear deployed. Director Capra says that in a Mach Five system failure, the physical properties of air and water produce such resistance that . . .”

  The weight of Todd’s hand fell on the manual cutoff and the voice stopped. Fresh nausea rose in his throat. He understood the implications of systems failures at Mach 5 far better than the announcer did. She was merely reading copy, speaking dispassionately so the ComLink translator-splitter could send the news out in every human language. In plain English, there was no hope. They would probably never even find much wreckage. It had become part of the Gambia Abyssal Plain on the ocean floor.

  Gib Owens, cocky, young, an expert pilot, a combat-ready Goddard Colonist, a trusted courier, a nice kid. Dead. And hundreds of others had died with him.

  “Too bad about the civilians.”

  The mysterious “they” who had sent the pilots had sent another team, probably saboteurs. “They” had killed 320 people in order to take out Gib Owens.

  Gib, asking Todd how he had seen through his disguise, saying a flaw might cost him his life. The forged papers hadn’t worked. Someone else had also, seen through his disguise. Or someone had betrayed him.

  Three hundred and twenty people. Pawns in a cold war between Earth and its first space colony.

  In the new mysticism, which the majority of Earth’s population claimed to accept, life was infinitely precious. They followed that belief more in theory than in practice, but it had changed the penal laws, altered the attitudes of even those participating in war. Life must be preserved, or at least saved for the human gene pool. Killing was a savage thing out of Earth’s past, something man must somehow put behind him, led by the Spirit of Humanity. But now and then you have to make a few sacrifices in order to get the damn Spacers . . .

  Todd sat very still, not seeing the flickering com screen continuing the now-silenced broadcast, not seeing the burned and blackened walls around him. He was seeing names and idents that weren’t quite right, and a picture remote-relayed from Antarctica, which a computer had cut off much too soon. He was getting advice from an enforcement officer telling him to take the air route henceforth and avoid trouble. Friendly counsel, honestly intended? Or had it been a method of steering Todd into the path of two assassins? Mari, on the tape, begging Todd to consult Fairchild, to get in touch with Goddard’s secret allies—“people in high places . . . a general . . .” Like General Ames, P.O.E. Enforcement’s second in command? Was he one of the anonymous friends of the Spacers? Or was Ames yet another factor in an enemy conspiracy? In his mind’s eye Todd saw Ames staring hard at Pat while he made a truce announcement, and Ames lurking in the back of the hall when the Science Council tried to quiet the public’s fears about the alien messenger. Coincidence? That Ames showed up where he did and when he did? That people were saying and doing things which later seemed to tie in with deadly events? Was Todd letting his suspicions run wild? Or did he have good reason to be on guard?

  Whom could he trust? Whom could he depend on?

  Games. He and Mari and Pat flying mock combats through the palms girdling Saunderhome. But this game was different, and very deadly.

  Gib Owens, delivering the tape with those eighteen names. Todd had tried to check them out, unsuccessfully. And a short while later, he was forced to fly for his life. Another coincidence? A straight dive into the Atlantic at Mach 5 might look like a coincidence, an accidental systems failure, too. But Todd knew it wasn’t.

  What about a frozen prison under the Antarctic glacier? Were systems, failures going on there as well?

  “Was all this really worth Gib’s life, and the other lives, Mari?” Todd’s voice broke. No! The question was unfair to Mari, he was asking the wrong person. He flinched away from the alternative, the accusations forming in his mind.

  Who wanted Gib Owens and the knowledge he
might have shared out of the way? Who wanted any inquiries aimed at certain confinees in SB Antarctic Enclave dropped?

  Two puzzles, maybe interrelated in ways Todd didn’t yet understand. But the pieces surrounding them were making frightening sense. When someone had firebombed Project Search, a mysterious call had taken Todd out of target range—a call on a circuit available only to top-level Saunder Enterprises personnel. And when Todd had made his probes of P.O.E. Archives and SE’s computer system, he had done so with his own top-privacy circuit. Had the same unknown enemy tapped in and found out what he was doing and decided to discourage him from trying that again?

  Possibly. In fact, it was the most logical explanation. And it broke every law and required access to systems supposedly locked against everyone but the Saunders.

  Protecting him from the firebombing, instructing the assassin pilots to scare him, but not kill him. Someone in power within the conspiracy had taken great pains to keep Todd Saunder alive. But it was okay to kill Anatole and Gib Owens and 320 people on the Nairobi transport. What was special about Todd Saunder? Why was he exempt?

  He was exempt because he was a Saunder.

  And the chief of assassins might have to answer to someone very close to the family. Perhaps someone who was family.

  Todd’s mind and emotions shrank, icy cold. He withdrew into a personal eye of the hurricane deep within his being.

  His next move was going to take careful planning. It could be—would be—tricky and very dangerous. He couldn’t afford to make mistakes. It only took one, for Ward Saunder or for his too-curious second son. Todd mulled the risks as grief and rage strengthened his determination. First he would have to call CNAU Enforcement and report this incident, as “they” anticipated he would. Follow their schedule, for now. Don’t arouse their suspicions. Not yet.

  But before this thing was through, “they” were in for some surprises. Big ones. He was going to find the answers. He owed it to Gib and the other victims. And he, owed it to himself, and to the species the alien messenger had crossed light-years to meet.