The Forever Hero (27 page)

The commander glanced down at the plastone tiles of the corridor flooring, absently noting the swirled smoothness of the surface. One way to tell the older or more heavily traveled sections of the Administration bunker was by the flooring. The clear sections were new or total replacements. The swirled sections were those that had been remelted and refinished, the colors washed together in abstract but regular patterns.

His boots clicked faintly on the opaque swirls as he approached the open Operations portal.

The corridor lights were at half-intensity, their normal off-duty setting, but the lack of full interior light was artificial dimness, not the honest gloom of twilight or dawn.

Without thinking, he adjusted the linked diamonds on his right collar before stepping through the portal.

“Who's…oh, Commander…Anything I can do for you, ser?” The duty tech stiffened behind the console as he recognized the base commander.

“No, thank you, Derla. Just checking. Carry on.”

He walked to the left, around the console toward the small cubicles that served as offices for the senior ops tech, the deputy ops boss, and the Operations officer. The last office was the one he had used, after Vlerio, and the one Trelinn had used before he'd been replaced by Lerwin.

From behind him, the lights of the duty section cast his shadow, a hazy outline, over the plastone floor blocks before him. The shadow was clearer near his feet and grew increasingly indistinct as it stretched away toward the unlighted sections of Operations in front of him. To his right, the two rows of consoles hunched in the darkness, vague outlines at the edge of reality.

He stopped at the first cubicle on his left, that of the senior tech, and looked through the old-fashioned open doorway. Not even the Operations officer himself rated a full portal. The technician's cubicle was dark, though Gerswin could easily make out the console, the two straight chairs that faced it, and the swivel that was neatly drawn up before the blank screen.

The neatness of the arrangement reflected the organized mind
set of Versario, the current Operations senior technician. Gerswin nodded before continuing to the next doorway.

The second darkened room also contained a console, a swivel, and straight chairs, but none were aligned neatly, but almost randomly, with the swivel pushed back from the console, as if Captain Harwits had shoved it back on his way out of the office. On the wall facing the console was the holo view favored by most Imperial-born graduates of the Academy, the Academy Spire. This one outlined the tower against the setting sun, rather than showing the reflection in Crystal Lake. A pair of solideo cubes rested on the console, glowing faintly, though brightly enough for Gerswin to see that they represented two different young women.

The corners of his lips twisted upward momentarily, and he nodded before resuming his tour.

The office in the left rear corner of the Operations section belonged to the Operations officer. On this night, as on every other night when the Ops boss was not on duty, merely on call, the door was open, but the lighting off.

Gerswin stepped into the office, the faint click of his boots dying out as he crossed onto the thin local carpet that Lerwin had brought in. Other than the carpet, three solideo cubes, and a wall hanging of an intricate corded design that screamed the name of its creator to Gerswin, the office was as bleakly Imperial as it had been ten, fifteen, twenty, or fifty years earlier, the personalities of the men and women who had inhabited it erased by the sheer functionality of the standard equipment and layout.

The commander turned to face the diamond-shaped wall hanging, the starkness of the black and white cording a symbol in itself, studying the straight lines that seemed to curve, and the knots linking black and white, black and white. Kiedra's work, and impressive, he thought, although he had never considered himself as any judge of art.

After a time he backed away and stepped toward the console and the three solideo cubes. The one on the left corner was the closest. He leaned over to study the image of mother and son. He judged that the image was less than a year old from the fact that Corwin's chubbiness of cheek had nearly disappeared. The boy sat on his mother's knee, held gently with her right arm and hand, and the cleanness of the devilkid profile was already emerging from the chubbiness of infancy.

The commander stared at the cube. Last week, he'd watched as the boy had walked in with Kiedra to meet his father as both parents went off-duty. The steps had been fiercely independent.

Would Corwin have the strength of his parents?

The cube offered no answer, and the commander shifted his concentration to the second solideo, the one of Kiedra standing alone in the doorway of their home, in full dress uniform and with captain's bars glinting. Shortly, Gerswin knew, her promotion to major would come through to match Lerwin's, but her decision to go into facilities planning, while a great help to Gerswin, had put her on a slower advancement track.

The third cube showed all three—father, mother, and son—standing in the sunlight that was still infrequent, in the square of Denv Newtown.

The commander's eyes locked onto the image of the child again, scarcely more than knee-high to his parents, but with his jaw squared as if to declare to the world that he was ready to stand on his own.

“Wonder what it would be like…”

The inadvertent words escaping startled him, and he broke off the vocalized musings with a shake of his head.

With what he was, and with what he had to do, better Kiedra and Lerwin than he.

A child…What would he do with a son? Or a daughter?

Had Faith survived…or had Caroljoy…he pushed his past out of his mind. Those had been different days, and, besides, he was what he was, and the job was not done. As if it ever would be, the thought crept back into his mind. He pushed that away as well.

Resisting the urge to look back at the cubes and the wall hanging, he walked toward the door, heels clicking softly as he crossed from the patterned weave of the rug to the milky refinished swirls of the floor tiles.

Once outside Lerwin's office he paused, but did not turn, before continuing back toward the duty tech.

“Everything in order, Commander?”

“Everything…as it should be, Derla. As it should be.”

“Good night, Commander.”

“Good night, Derla.”

His boots echoed more sharply as he picked up his steps on the return trip to his quarters, and sleep. Sleep that would be dreamless, he hoped.

He fingered the linked diamonds on his collar absently, then dropped his hand as he turned into the proper radial for the commander's quarters.

“Take her straight up,” stated the commander calmly. “Ten thousand meters above the base.”

“Straight up?”

“Circle if the power consumption worries you.”

The flitter's liftoff was shaky. Adequate, but shaky, as the lieutenant twisted power into the thrusters, and as the flitter, older than the pilot by far, shuddered out of ground effect and into flight.

“Opswatch, Outrider Five. Departing prime base at zero nine four zero. Estimated return at one one zero zero.”

“Outrider Five. Understand return at one one zero zero. Interrogative fuel status.”

“Fuel status is two plus five. Two plus five.”

“Understand two point five,” corrected the voice from the console. “Cleared to depart.”

The commander stared straight ahead from the copilot's seat through the armaglass canopy while the pilot completed departure procedures, and the flitter circled into the morning sky.

Inside the cockpit, the faint odor of machine oil and ozone dissipated with the slow but steady influx of colder air as the flitter circled upward.

“Do you know why you were assigned here, Lieutenant?”

“That was the requirement of my contract, ser.”

The commander could have added the unspoken sentences and resentments to the technically correct answer, but chose to ignore them. Instead he asked another question.

“I take it that you would rather have had a first assignment with the fleet, then?”

“I'm grateful for the education and training that the Empire provided, Commander—”

“But you question the value of I.S.S. officers being assigned to Old Earth when they didn't chose their parentage.”

The commander's thin smile was hidden behind his impact visor.

The young officer said nothing.

“What would you do, Lieutenant, if you lost all power—like this.”

As he spoke, the commander twisted all power off both thrusters and yanked the stick back into his lap.

Whheeeee!

Pitching up and to the right, the flitter bucked once again, and the port stub wing dropped sharply.

The pilot pushed the stick forward, leveled the flitter and dropped the nose, at the same time swinging the port thruster throttle back around the detente and manually feeding fuel to the engine.

Two coughs and the flitter was back under power.

Without hesitating the lieutenant completed the airstart on the starboard thruster and matched both thrusters at the three quarter power level, leaving them there until the exhaust temperatures dropped into the green and until the flitter was reestablished in a gentle climb.

“Just now, Lieutenant, your actions answered one question.”

The pilot refused to look toward his senior officer, instead kept his attention on the controls and indicators, still scanning the exterior view as well.

“Would you explain, ser?”

“An airstart is difficult in one of these old birds. Most Service pilots come close to crashing or bring them in with cold rotors. Blood will tell, Lieutenant, like it or not.”

The commander cleared his throat and continued. “Take her back up, and I'll show you what's been done before we put it in context.”

The flitter leveled off at ten thousand meters, with the slight hiss on the background which indicated the efforts of the pressurization system to keep up with the inevitable leaks.

“Keep heading zero nine zero.”

“Yes, ser.”

To the east, near the horizon, was a patchwork of gray-brown and purple-gray. Closer to the nose of the flitter, at roughly a thirty degree angle below the horizon, an irregular swath of darkish brown marked the division between the wastelands and the green and gold that stretched from beneath the flitter out toward the purples and browns. The commander gestured.

“See that line? What we've reclaimed. Basically three hundred kays from the mountains, runs five-six hundred kays north-south.”

“Yes, ser.”

The commander turned in his seat to study the lieutenant.

The junior officer shifted his weight, but kept his eyes running through the continual scan patterns embedded by his training.

Only the hiss of the pressurization system and the whine of the thrusters murmured through the cockpit.

“Remember the landspouts? Or were you too young when you left?”

“I remember one. It killed my mother, Commander.”

“Now that we've reclaimed this sector this far out, we've reduced the annual numbers at the base and the new town to less than ten anywhere nearby. Climatologists tell me we'll never eliminate them, but we will be able to reduce their intensity to normal tornadoes.” He paused. “There were a hundred my first year. They still have a hundred or so on the Scotia coast. One reason why our latest push is there.”

The flitter crossed the demarcation line between the reclaimed land and the ecological wilderness to the east, bucking several times to the hiss of the pressurizers.

Farther to the east began to appear dark gray clouds, thicker and more threatening than the scattered gray and white puffs above the flitter.

“Bring her about to two seven five, then due north along the border line.”

“Yes, ser. Coming to two seven five.”

“To bring back a planet's a big job, Lieutenant, and I need the best people possible, no matter how I have to get them.”

The commander scanned the board himself, but refrained from pointing out the slight imbalance between the port and starboard thrusters.

“You wonder if I mean that. Whether it's just words. But I do. Just how much you'll find out.”

The tightening of the pilot's muscles was apparent to the commander, who shrugged. That was the first reaction they all had, all of them who came home from the comforts of the Empire and the excitement of the Academy and the advanced training.

“Turn north, and steady on zero zero five.”

“Yes, ser.”

“Wild outside the northern perimeter, and you need to see it all before you understand.”

“Yes, ser.”

The commander smiled again behind his impact visor, and the flitter, pressurizers hissing in the background, steadied on zero zero five.

Ballad of the Captain