Hero! (32 page)

“Thank you, Maeve—for all your work tonight. Great job!”

She was swaddled in a bulky, shapeless housecoat, color indeterminate in the shadow. When she looked up at him, he saw the whites of her eyes, mostly.

“I didn’t do it as a favor to you, Vaun. But you’re quite welcome if you want to take it as one.”

“Sure, I will. Thank you.”

“Ah, these rare little courtesies! Then I’d better apologize for gate-crashing, hadn’t I? But it was the late Admiral Roker’s fault, not mine.”

“I understand that. Not your fault.”

“And you’re going to let us all go home tomorrow…today, is it now? So I’ll be out of your hair.”

“Well…Look, Maeve…I’m likely to be away for at least another night. You can stay on until I return, if you want.” He couldn’t promote her, but at least he could offer her something.

“And just why would I want to do that?” she asked, her voice a little sharper than before.

“Valhal?”

“What about Valhal? What’s wrong with Arkady?”

He shrugged, surprised. “I just thought…Well, please yourself.”

“Oh, I shall.” She sat up straighter. “Thought what?”

“Nothing.” He was too excited about the Kohab thing to want a knock-’em-down tussle with Maeve. And he hadn’t had any stiffener lately—funny how that changed his feelings toward her. The adipose tissue that had fascinated him before would now seem merely an inefficient redundancy.

“No, do tell. I’m really curious now. Why did you think I’d want to stay in Valhal?”

There was no way to say it without being offensive, but he tried to keep his tone dispassionate and matter-of-fact. “Because you whored and lied and cheated and betrayed everyone and everything just to stay on as hostess in Valhal if by a miracle I did manage to get it away from Roker. So I assumed you would still be interested, that’s all. A reasonable assumption. Doesn’t matter. It was a long time ago. As you said, it doesn’t matter now.”

She seemed to consider that for a moment, while he slung the Giantkiller on his shoulder and buttoned his tunic.

“Well, shitty shoes!” she said softly. “Is that what you think? You’ve been looking at it that way all these years?”

“How else?” He wondered again about spare boots.

“Well, I admit I wasn’t always truthful. And I never claimed to be a bashful virgin, but I never realized…You still think that, do you?”

“With some justification,” he retorted, beginning to feel testy. “And maybe one day you can drop me a note, explaining my error. Meanwhile,
if
you will excuse me, I must run.”

“Danger? When a boy packs guns and runs in the night, he must be in danger.” She rose, a shapeless blur in the housecoat. “Trouble, Vaun? Can I help?”

“No. Well, one thing—keep that giddy little daughter of yours quiet, will you? I’d prefer she not go public until I get back. Appreciate that. Good-bye, Maeve. And thanks again for looking after the wounded.” He turned.

“Wait! Vaun…be careful!”

He paused at the door. “What does that mean?”

“It means trouble. It means Q ships and pepods and the Patrol and the Brotherhood. I suppose it means I’d hate anything to happen to you.”

He snorted with a sudden surge of bitterness. “A tearful farewell? Do you remember when I went off to intercept
Unity
? When I was pretending to be Prior? When my chances of coming back were one in a billion?”

“Yes. Of course I remember. Why?”

“We were lovers, then. Or I was. And you didn’t say good-bye then, Maeve. You left Hiport. You ran away back to Valhal. So why say good-bye now? Old age softening the hard edges a little?”

“And that has bothered you all these years?”

“Of course not! But it sure as hell bothered me then—that you’d leave without saying good-bye.” When she tried to speak he spoke louder. “I was very stupid, wasn’t I? I should have realized then that I wasn’t anything to you except a future meal ticket, and that had stopped seeming very likely. That was all you’d been interested in. Oh, I should have seen right there! I should have known. But I didn’t. When I came back alive and you rushed into my arms…I really believed.”

“Vaun…That wasn’t what mattered!”

He laughed, and opened the door.

“Vaun! Please!”

He stopped.

“Vaun, please don’t go off mad like that. I didn’t say good-bye that time because I couldn’t bear to. I was cowardly, yes, but it was because I
loved
you that I ran away.”

He chuckled.

“Roker had told me that you wouldn’t be coming back—no way! Yather was going to shoot you if the brethren didn’t, he said. That was why Roker didn’t mind risking Valhal, because there was no way you were going to come back alive. And I couldn’t face you, knowing that! Can’t you imagine how I felt, knowing what I’d done?”

“The expression is ‘shitty shoes,’ I believe.”

“Its true. Damn you, it’s true! If I was faking it in bed, I could have faked a fond good-bye, couldn’t I? No, please listen. And I was never hostess in Valhal until you made me hostess in Valhal.”

“What?” He spun around to look at her, but she was against the Angelbright windows and he couldn’t see her face.

“I thought you knew! Yes, Roker threw me at you, but I wasn’t his bedmate. Never.”

“That day in the cloakroom…”

“Lies, of course!” Her voice cracked. “Yes, Roker planned all of that and told me what to say. He had three girls lined up, I drew short straw, and you took the first hook. All that crap about his liking boys…He planned it all, even to telling you to demand Valhal as your price.
All of it!
But I was never his mistress! Never. Before or after. Beefy loudmouths ain’t my fun.”

“Well, it doesn’t matter now,” he said angrily.

“It does, I think. I didn’t do it for Roker, and I sure as Krantz didn’t do it for Valhal. I did it because of the Brotherhood.”

He said nothing. The torch was waiting, he ought to run.

“I did it because the human race was in danger, here on Ult! Isn’t that a little more forgivable? Do you know how old I was?” She took a step toward him. “You still think I’m older than you, don’t you? Something you said last night in Arkady…I was seventeen, Vaun. You were twenty-two.”

He grunted. “It doesn’t matter now.”

“But it mattered then! You were so green! You thought you were a tough nut from Doggoth, and oh, you were tough. Tough physically. And emotionally, I suppose. I was younger, but not quite so green as you. I’d been one of Prior’s statistics, I don’t deny it. That was one of the criteria Roker used in selecting—”

“Come on, Maeve! Oh, come on! You’re asking me to believe that you’d never had any boy except Prior? Because—”

“It’s true, Vaun.”

Good God!
And Roker was dead now. Why should she lie now?

“Prior, twice. Once drunk, once sober. Then Vaun, Vaun, Vaun…All the Vaun I could get. I only agreed to whore for Roker, for the Patrol, because the world was in danger from the Brotherhood. He persuaded me that you were the secret weapon, but the Patrol needed to keep you under control and know what you were thinking. And you needed love.”

“Sex!” he said sharply.

“No!” Her voice was softer now. “The stiffener made you need that. It still does. You were a motherless, friendless boy, and you needed love. I don’t think you’ve changed very much.”

“You forget I’m not human.”

“You’re human that way. All those girls who came after me in Valhal…And from what I know of the brethren, they need love even more than we do.”

“You don’t know much.”

“More than you think. They have each other. They love one another, don’t they?”

Raj? Dice? And Prior’s memories of Monad Hive and…

And
Unity
, the Q ship, most of all.

“Maybe,” he said gruffly. “Yes, they love one another.”

Was that why he was rushing off now to Kohab? Just to see Dice again? Ask forgiveness?

“And you had no one,” Maeve said. “I set out to be a whore and saw I had to be a mother and discovered I’d become a lover. Bed had really nothing to do with it, Vaun. Oh, you were great! Terrific. Never found a better. But it wasn’t bed I wanted from you.”

He felt sick. “It was Valhal!”

She shook her head, and took a deep breath, and he realized that she was probably weeping. He could never remember seeing Maeve weep, not even the day he threw her out. The idea of Maeve weeping was unthinkable.

“Why then?” he snapped. “When I came back? For five years you balled me by night and tattled to Roker by day. Security had records of your calls. If that isn’t whoring, I don’t know what is! And for what? It certainly wasn’t for me. For Valhal, is what.” He turned to go.

“Blackmail! Don’t you see, even yet? When you returned, we all thought you must be one of the brethren. It was impossible that the Vaun we knew had survived! So Roker demanded that I come back. To watch over you and see if you were genuine, the real one—that was what I was supposed to do, and that was what I did, and I told him you were the real Vaun, and I loved you, but then I couldn’t stop tattling to him because he blackmailed me. He said if I changed sides, he’d tell you the whole story and then you’d throw me out. DataCen did psychoplots.”

“Crap! They’re worthless.”

“No. In the end they proved right enough. When you discovered, you did throw me out! And I always knew you would. I couldn’t bear to see you hurt any more…”

“Gwathshit!” he muttered, still not looking at her.

Maeve sighed. “The tragedy was that there were no secrets to spill, except medical ones.”

He bristled. “Medical?”

“The medics were curious about the effect stiffener has on you. You’re either indifferent or a raging satyr. The same as Prior. Don’t tell me you haven’t noticed?”

“You preferred the latter, of course.”

“Oh yes! I enjoyed the effects! But I loved you best when you were content just to be yourself: self-contained, competent, honest…not trying to act like a great celebrity, or a spacer stud, or a social snob. But even then, even when you became all those things, I still loved you.”

Silence. Then she laughed ruefully. “I think I still do.”

“Who’s Feirn’s father?”

“A minor poet with carroty hair and political aspirations. He died in the Cashalix food riots, before she was born. You didn’t bed her?”

“No, I did not!”

“I wish you had.”

“
Maeve!
”

She made a noise somewhere between a snigger and a sniffle. “I made a terrible mess of Feirn. All her life, she’s heard me jabbering on about Vaun, Vaun, Vaun, and how I loved him. Still love him.”

Roker was dead. She had Arkady. She had a career. Why would she say such a thing now?

It certainly couldn’t be for pride.

He had a painful ache he couldn’t place. “Maeve…when I get back, in a day or two…may I come and see you, in Arkady?”

“Of course. Anytime, Vaun.”

“Thank you,” he said gruffly. “I must go now.”

“Do take care, won’t you?”

“You, too.”

He left the room before he was tempted to do something foolish.

T
HE TIP OF Bandor was already turning pink when Vaun jumped down from the cart, shivering in the clammy dawn air. Half a dozen nondescript torches stood on the tarmac. The magnificent Sheerfire had been hauled out from under cover and waited in full sight, but there was no one around to see. That was no mere torch; that was a cruiser.

The passenger door stood open. He closed it behind him and wandered forward with his hand on his holster. Roker had done himself proud, from kidskin chairs to gold taps. The high admiral’s barge was a miniature flying palace—bedchamber, office, lounge, galley…

Flight deck.

Lieutenant Blade was sitting in the copilot’s seat, going through a hardcopy manual. He was almost at the end of it, too.

Vaun took the other seat, laid the Giantkiller out of the copilot’s reach and regarded his companion quizzically.

“Thank you,” he said. “Dismissed.”

The mauve eyes held his scrutiny without flinching. “Estimated flight time to Kohab nine hours, sir.”

Vaun could have said,
What makes you think I am going to Kohab?
He didn’t.

“I disconnected the automatics as you instructed, sir.” Blade could have added,
And that means they can’t detect you coming
. He didn’t.

Nor did he say,
It is a flagrant breach of regulations and civilian laws, also, because neither Hiport not any air traffic control center is going to know you are airborne
.

And he did not point out that Vaun had not slept all night and a tub like this was going to be a brute to fly on manual for nine hours.

The staring continued. Any boy who collected virtually every medal Doggoth offered must have brains in unusual quantities, however monolithic he pretended to be. He did not have all the data, because he did not know that Vaun was immune to pepods, but it was a fair guess that Lieutenant Blade knew what Vaun expected to find at the isolated outpost of Kohab.

Blade did not ask what Vaun planned to do about it. But he had certainly noticed the guns.

He did not say,
If you forbid me to accompany you, then my duty is absolutely clear and I must report you immediately to Acting High Admiral Weald
.

It was.

He would, too.

Vaun’s trouble was that he did not know exactly what he planned to do at Kohab. Dice? Invite his two brothers to come and spend a comfortable retirement at Valhal?

He snapped open his holster.

Blade’s thin face showed no reaction.

Juvenile dreams of honor and heroism…

Crazy mixed-up randoms!

“Are you prepared to obey my orders without question, no matter how they may seem?”

Flicker. “Of course, sir.”

Vaun sighed and rubbed his eyes. He did not say,
Do you really think you can fly this bitch without autos, sonny?

What he did say was, “Take her up, then.”

It was the first time he had seen Blade smile.

T
HE RENOWNED MOLOCH designers had been a brilliant and imaginative lot, but they had never conceived of anyone being crazy enough to try flying a Sheerfire on manual. Blade did clear the treetops, but he probably lost some paint. He certainly lost Vaun’s stomach. After that nothing seemed too terrible; he took her up to cruising altitude and headed south over the sea. Under the circumstances, he was flying very well. Of course. Not a word was spoken.