The Forever Hero (20 page)

“You've been avoiding me.”

The I.S.S. lieutenant had green hawk-eyes and tight curled black hair. Her eyes were level with the major who stood by the battered console.

Outside of the panoramic pictures of the western peaks spread on the wall behind the console, the small office was bare of decoration. The flat top surface of the console and the working surface to the right of the screen were also bare, except for the small pile of hard copy reports in the left-hand corner, and for the thin and tattered publication lying next to the console screen.

The lieutenant's eyes darted to the publication and drank in the title
—Program Key Locks—Patterns and Uses—
before returning her eyes to the hawk-yellow stare of the major.

“Have I?”

“Yes,” she answered.

Each waited a moment, then another.

At last, the major's lips quirked slightly. “Guess I have.” He shrugged.

“I said I'd be back. I know you didn't promise anything. But you're cold. Lake the ice rain. And you're not.”

Inclining his head, he returned her statement with a puzzled frown.

“Cold like the ice rain, but I'm not?”

“You know what I mean. Under your ice…” She broke off her own statement with a half-shrug, half-headshake.

“Suppose so.” He cleared his throat, looked down at the smooth flooring, then back at her. “Didn't mean to hurt you. Or to string you along. Hoped you'd understand.”

He looked away from the directness in her eyes.

“Techs say you lost the woman you loved. That you won't let yourself care again. That you throw your knives like hate.”

She glanced over his shoulder at the half-holo view on the far right, the needle spire of Centerpeak.

He did not look up.

“Lost…one way of putting it. Lost both.” His head came up abruptly, and his eyes locked hers, both unwavering. He said nothing.

This time she looked away, her eyes seeking the thin volume on the console, noting the irregular print of the title, the yellowed tinge to the pages.
Program Key Locks
had all the hallmarks of an underground datapick manual. She wondered where the major, the devilkid dedicated to the Service and to the reclamation of Old Earth, had discovered it, and why.

Realizing that she was letting her thoughts avoid dwelling on his isolation, she forced herself to raise her eyes back to his.

“You make it hard to talk,” she said.

“True. Hard for all of us devilkids. Harder for me, I suspect. Maybe not.”

He took a half-step away from the console toward her.

“Kiedra…not the one for you.”

She did not move, standing perfectly still as if encased in solid ice rain.

He took another step, lifting each of her hands into his. Gently.

“Not now. Not ever.”

He could see the glistening sheen building in her eyes, refused to let himself be moved, refused to let the ice that surrounded him crack, and stood, hands holding hers.

“Not ever?” She tilted her head fractionally to the side and back, moistened her lips.

Gerswin resisted the urge to brush her lips with his, instead leaned forward and let them brush her forehead. He stepped back, but did not release her hands.

Kiedra blinked twice, though no tears fell from the corners of her eyes, and swallowed.

“Still not easy,” her voice husked, almost dry.

The major shook his head gently, squinting once as if the soft light in the small office were more like the glare above the clouds or on the peaks represented behind him on the wall.

“No. It's not.”

“Can you tell me why?”

“Not now. When I can, you won't need me to.”

“Should I understand?”

Gerswin shrugged.

“Depends on what you remember. Depends on what you value, and on what I value. Right now, we have to value different things.”

He released her hands. His own tingled from the contact with the strong coolness of her fingers.

“Greg…”

She did not finish the statement she began, but looked down, to the console, to the floor, then back to the yellow hardness of piercing hawk-eyes.

Finally, she began again. “Can't be Greg, can it? Has to be Captain. Or Major. Or Commander. You have too much to do, too much to let yourself go right now.”

He did not answer, but met her eyes. Again, she looked away.

“So strong…and so hurt…” She lifted her head, her chin, and gave a little shake. “So few will look past the hawk.”

His lips quirked once more.

“Hawk? I think not.”

“Hawk,” she affirmed. “A hawk with a heart too big for hunting, and a purpose too vast not to.”

He shrugged. “Hawk or not, poetic words or not, some have stood by you…and will when I cannot. Will be for you alone, when I cannot.”

“There is that.”

“Then do not disregard it.”

“I do as I please.”

“Do as you please, Kiedra. Do as you please.”

“Do I sound that awful?”

Gerswin had to grin at the mock-plaintive note in her question.

“Not quite.”

The lieutenant studied his grin and the forced twinkle in his eyes. After a moment, she returned his expression with a smile.

“Should I laugh or cry?”

“Should I?”

“Both!”

The lieutenant followed her exclamation by throwing both arms around the major, kissed him hard upon the lips, and dropped away as quickly as she had struck.

“That's for what you've missed, and for treating me fairly. Not sure I wanted to be treated fairly, and I reserve the right to reopen the question.”

With that, she turned.

The major did not move as he watched her cross the last few meters and leave the office, an office that felt barer than before.

He swallowed, then took a deep breath. His chest felt strangely tight, and he inhaled deeply again, shaking his shoulders and trying to relax. His eyes felt hot, not quite burning, but he blinked back the feeling, finally looking down at
Program Key Locks
.

“Hope Lerwin appreciates her…”

His words sounded empty in the office, echoed coldly against the flat walls.

He sat and stared for a long time at the console screen.

Long after the echoes had died, long after the lieutenant had vanished, long after, the index finger of his left hand touched the console keyboard.

He sighed once more, then resumed the work he had started what seemed ages ago, before an early spring had come and gone in the space of a few afternoon moments.

The red-headed lieutenant waved.

“Come on, Captain.”

Gerswin smiled. The devilkids, as they trickled back to Old Earth, uniformly referred to him as “Captain,” for all that he wore the single gold triangle of an I.S.S. major on his tunic collars or his flight suits.

The lieutenant waved again from the open hatchway of the dozer's armored cockpit. “Come on.”

Gerswin broke into a quickstep for the remaining fifty meters across the tarmac.

“Getting slower there, Captain.”

Gerswin shook his head to dispute the fact, but grinned and said
nothing as he swung into the cockpit and closed the hatch behind him.

Lieutenant Glynnis MacCorson closed her own hatch and strapped in.

“Damned cargo run,” she grumped.

“You still like it.”

“You're right. Since they didn't want any more flitter pilots, had to find something else to run. Didn't matter if it was big and ugly.”

She turned to the controls before her, controls more like a spacecraft than a flitter.

“Everyone's aboard, Lieutenant.” The tech peered into the cockpit through the hatchway from the small passenger/cargo/living section of the arcdozer.

“Stet, Nylen. Commencing power-up.”

Gerswin watched, unspeaking, as she ran through the checklist which centered on the fusactor powering the behemoth that could have swallowed an I.S.S. corvette for breakfast and converted it into constituent elements.

“GroundOps, Dragon Two, departing for town. Estimate time en route one point one.”

“Understand time en route one point one. Cleared for departure.”

“Stet, Dragon Two on the run.”

Gerswin shook his head. Speed, the dozers weren't made for. The new town, as yet unnamed by the transplanted shambletowners, the few retired techs, the married Service techs, and the handful of immigrants, was less than ten kays away, down a wide and hard-packed causeway with no turns. What would have taken a minute or three by flitter was a major undertaking by dozer. But then, dozers weren't normally used for transport, except on their way to and from major refits at the base.

Before too long, Gerswin reflected, it might be worth the expense to set up a forward maintenance facility, particularly as the dozer operations moved eastward.

Dragon Two was carrying the back-up fusactor for the town. While it could have been airlifted in sections by flitter, assembly was easier at the base, and the arcdozer's slow and even speed made the transport practical.

Once the power source was deposited on its foundation, the structure and distribution system would be completed around it.

Glynnis smiled happily as she checked the monitors, and as the
dozer tracks rumbled across the hard packed clay, compacting it still further.

Gerswin shifted his weight in the seat normally used by the senior tech and let his eyes slide over the blanked out bank of controls that would normally monitor intake, processing, and treatment of the tons of dirt, clay, and organic matter that a dozer processed hour by hour, day after day.

A movement caught his eye, and he glanced up.

At the top of a low embankment ahead of the dozer and to the right of the causeway stood a group of shambletowners, old shambletowners dressed in tattered coyote leathers. They stood, blank-faced, and watched as the dozer rumbled toward them.

Their eyes were slits, their faces hard in the bright light of a morning that was only partly cloudy, with a few traces of a cold blue sky above the mottled white and gray clouds.

“Not exactly friendly,” observed Glynnis.

“No. We've changed a few things.”

“And they don't care for the changes. Can't say I have much sympathy. Did so well under the old way, didn't we?”

Gerswin saw the leathers of the sling and repressed the urge to jump as the missile hurled toward the dozer.

Crack!

The stone slapped against the cockpit armaglass, leaving only a streak of dust.

A figure on the end of the line of shambletowners was reloading his sling with another smooth stone.

Fynian, Gerswin thought, although the man was looking down and not directly at the major.

Crack!

Glynnis shook her head.

“Really are out after us.”

“Devilkids and Impies one and the same to them.”

“We know different, Captain.”

Gerswin smiled faintly. “For them, it's all the same.” He looked back over his right shoulder at the shambletowners, still standing in a line on the embankment. “If we succeed, Glynnis, won't be the same for us, either.”

“Take longer than I've got, Captain.”

Gerswin nodded slowly and settled back to watch the lieutenant as the causeway rolled slowly by. He drank in the tall plains grass that was beginning to fill in the spots where nothing had grown, and glanced from checkerboard field to checkerboard field where
the organic sponge grains grew and would be harvested again and again until the soil was ready for grass or food crops for people or livestock—not that there would be much livestock for a long time to come if he and the ecologists had much to say about it.

How long before the land was ready? He shrugged. Mahmood's prediction had been ten years after the first sponge grains and outcropping. So far, for the few lands that had completed the process, Mahmood had been right.

He missed the idealistic ecologist, but who could blame him for retiring to take the ecology chair at the college on Medina?

Time passed people by, slowly, ponderously, just as the dozer had passed the shambletowners, but with the same kind of unstoppable force.

“You know your records will stand, Captain?”

Glynnis's words broke his reverie.

“Records?”

“The ones you set for the Academy Ironman. Lerwin came within five minutes. No one else has come within twenty, and they never will.”

“Someday, someone will. Time passes.”

The cockpit lit as the clouds let the sun break through, and Gerswin absorbed the warmth momentarily before tapping the vent to bring in more cool air from outside. Too much light and heat still bothered him.

“They say ice water runs in your veins.”

“Anti-ice, maybe.”

Gerswin knew he was being distant, but he hoped she would understand.

Whether Glynnis did or not, the lieutenant said nothing else as the dozer rumbled over the highest point on the trip and began the equally gentle descent toward the town.

Gerswin relaxed as much as he could, and tried to enjoy the slow pace of the trip, away from the base, from the constant flow of communications that cluttered the Ops screens, all of which had to be monitored and evaluated before Vlerio had a chance to see it, much less act on it. With Vlerio off with the base commander for the three days ahead, Gerswin could leave Lerwin to watch the screens and the day-to-day activities.

Anything really serious and Lerwin could reach him in seconds.

Gerswin watched as the town wall appeared ahead on the right. Before he knew it the dozer was slowing, gradually, heavily, but certainly.

“GroundOps, Dragon Two at destination. Beginning cargo drop this time.”

“Stet. Understand cargo drop. Report when drop complete and proceeding to station.”

“Stet. Will report when proceeding to station.”

Gerswin eased himself out of the operator's seat. He stood in the space behind the two front seats as Glynnis and Nylen began to maneuver the dozer around to place the materials drop section, where the fusactor sat, as close as possible to the reinforced ferroplast slab.

“Twenty reverse on the right rear.”

“Twenty right rear.”

“Bring up the left a touch.”

“Stet.”

“Stress load on the ramp is point nine five and steady.”

“Lieutenant, we've got it on the downslope and clear of the joints. Hold the tracs.”

“Locked and holding…”

“…three more on the left…”

“…right corner sticking…liquid slick it…”

“…clearing top section…”

“…load factor on the ramp at point eight three and dropping…”

“…clear of the ramp, and in position.”

“Understand clear of the ramp.”

“That's affirmative, Lieutenant. You're clear to move forward.”

Gerswin watched as Glynnis wiped her forehead with the back of her jumpsuit sleeve.

“On the roll.”

Hands flicking across the console, Glynnis eased the dozer away from the uncompleted section of the town wall and back down the incline onto the causeway, bringing the dozer to a stop.

“That's done, Captain.”

“Nicely,” he commented with a smile.

“No…But we got it done. Sloppy on the trac balancing.”

She pushed several stray red hairs off her forehead and squared herself in the seat.

“You leaving now?”

“Don't want to go out on station while you plow up my favorite purple clay and change it into old-fashioned dirt. Not now, anyway.”

“Sure about that?”

“I'm sure.”

“Have it your way, Captain.” She flashed a smile. “See you in a week or so.”

He nodded, then ducked down the passageway and out through the crew exit.

The other tech, Krysten, snapped a salute at him as he slipped outside and landed lightly on the packed red clay.

After returning the salute, he walked back toward the uncompleted section of the wall, paralleling the half-meter deep prints the dozer had left in the work ramp.

As he reached the spot where the fused clay wall had been left untouched, he waved again at the dozer. Glynnis had already begun to inch Dragon Two forward and toward the golden plains beyond, toward a destination out beyond the golden green of the sponge grains, out over the horizon where the line of dozers methodically extended the borders of arable land.

Even seventy meters away, Dragon Two still towered over the wall and Gerswin, seemingly taller than either as it crept eastward.

In time, Gerswin turned and walked through the opening in the wall and past the ferroplast foundation where techs were already beginning to erect the remainder of the back-up power station around the fusactor. His feet took him toward the central square of the town that had no name.

At first glance, the new town could have passed for an updated and cleaner version of the old shambletown, with white glazed finishes over thick walls of fired bricks. But the streets, rather than narrow canyons, opened to the sky, boulevards radiating from the square. The houses, neither individual nor wall-to-wall, clustered in groups, standing in the midst of more open space than any shambletowner would have ever dreamed, although none were taller than two stories, and all possessed the thick walls. Instead of hide covers the windows had double-paned armaglass for their still small apertures.

The streets were paved with gray stone slabs cut with lasers, and stone flower boxes appeared at irregular intervals, filled with blue ice flowers and a yellow flower Gerswin did not recognize.

He passed an expanse of green turf, a park with several skeletal structures on which two children clambered. The grassy space was surrounded on three sides by clustered housing, and by the boulevard on the fourth.

One child wore a jumpsuit, the other a leather tunic over cloth trousers.

The major nodded at the mix of shambletown and Empire, but kept walking toward the central square.

The sunlight dimmed as the clouds above darkened and cut off
the direct rays, and as the wind rose again. So much for the hint of a real summer.

He sniffed the air, drawing in the hint of the rain which would likely fall, rain since it was midsummer. Only in the warmest of the supposed summer months was there little or no chance of ice rain, not that the ice rain bothered him much.

“Good morning, Major.”

“Good morning.”

Gerswin returned the greeting although he did not recognize the man who had passed him. From his dress, the man was a retired tech, one of the few who had elected to remain once their obligations had expired, despite the landspouts and the cold.

Like the shambletown, at midmorning the central square was mostly deserted, except for the handful of older men of Imperial origin, and three younger women, all noticeably pregnant.

Gerswin surveyed the buildings, all white glazed brick except for the community hall, which boasted a stone columned front and a short bell tower that reached roughly fifteen meters above the square.

The square itself consisted of a boulevard running in a rectangle around a central park two hundred meters on a side. Despite the grass, the bushes, a few flowers, and the pathways, something was missing.

He looked again.

Trees! Only a handful of dwarf trees were scattered amid the statues, the pathways, and the hedge maze on the right side where two boys and three girls shrieked as they tore down the dead-end and hidden corridors.

He nodded in understanding. With the high winds, the town couldn't afford the damage of a substantial tree thrown into a building.

After sniffing at the air, and discovering nothing but the smells of newness—new brick, new stone, new plastics—he glanced around the square again before beginning his walk to the right and toward the street that would lead to the landing field at the western side of the town.

His steps slowed as he passed two women who sat at opposite ends of a stone bench rising out of the too-green grass imported from New Colora, grass originally from Old Earth.

“…that's him…one they call the captain…”

Gerswin ignored the whispers and kept walking.

“Captain of what? He's a major.”

“Some say he's the devil's captain…Was a devilkid….”

“…good-looking in his own way….”

Gerswin kept walking and let the voices fade into the background as his steps brought him opposite the community hall.

His eyes passed over the closed endurasteel doors. Automatic portals would have taken too much energy—particularly for civilians, the Service had noted. Gerswin had agreed with the decision, but not for that reason.