Hero! Read Online Free PDF Page B

shine in his eyes. It must be ten years ago now…One day just like any other day, and then somebody, somewhere, alarmed another pepod, and this one came flailing into a work gang with poison spines lashing and put eight boys and three girls into death agonies. A little place like this can’t afford screamers to keep the pepods away.
    There were no cameras here that day.
    Now the villagers are milling around, thinning out, backing away; puzzled, cowed, being prompted by hidden voices, moving so the cameras can see him, the hero being welcomed by his childhood friends. The freak is back.
    Olmin is visibly shaking. Looks like he has to speak first. Place hasn’t got a mayor, hasn’t got a priest. Seems Olmin has been designated as Best Friend. That’s a bitter joke! Olmin the taunter? Olmin the tormentor? Olmin who sat on his chest and beat fists on his face. Olmin who peed on him while the others held him down. Very reasonable—they just wanted to see if pee would turn his hair the right color. It never did. Best Friend? Well, why not? The rest were no better. Did you ever scare me as much as you are scared right now, big-kid Olmin?
    Missing faces…Glora isn’t there. They’d assured him that there would be no Glora. The Patrol doesn’t want the world to hear Admiral Vaun’s crazy mother screaming about meeting God and virgin birth and how she’s always known her son would save the world. Glora’s been taken away for treatment.
    Olmin makes a croaking noise and lays an awkward, shaking hand on Vaun’s shoulder, frightened of dirtying the epaulet.
    “Vaun!” He is licking his lips and listening to his prompter with his eyes so wide that the whites show all around the mud-brown irises. “It’s good…to see you…again. Vaun.” Pause. His scalp shines through his sandy hair.
    Vaun waits for his cue, tries to hold a smile, watches the goiter lump jiggling in Olmin’s throat. Feels sudden anger—why isn’t the local booster adjusted for iodine deficiency?
    Still Olmin’s turn. “And good…to be back…too, Vaun…I expect?”
    “‘It’s always good to come home, Olmin,’” prompts the voice in Vaun’s ear.
    He tries to say the words, and they stick in his throat like shit.
    Good to come home? No, it’s horrible to come home. I hate this place! I hate the lot of you. You made my life a hell, all of you. If I saved the world, then it wasn’t for you. God knows, it wasn’t for any of you .
    “It’s always good to come home, Olmin.”
    W AS OLMIN STILL alive, down there in the dark, living out his belly-crawling existence in the mud of the delta? It wasn’t likely, because the peasants’ booster was crude, all-purpose stuff, not tailor-made like a spacer’s. But Vaun could almost hope he was, because a life like that was its own punishment. Long life to Olmin!
    Now the torch was grazing the edges of space, where Angel could not hold back the flood of stars, and the night wore its finery. By habit, Vaun’s eyes sought out the constellation of the Swimmer, and the eye of the Swimmer—Alpha and Gamma, two reddish stars, the suns of Avalon. The suns that shone on Monad, where it all began…
    Angel was almost at the zenith. Dawn must be near.
    He laid back his seat in the torch; he reclined at ease in the little bubble and thought about ciphers and electronics and passwords and missiles. In theory the problem was simple—Commodore Tham was entitled to barricade himself inside Forhil to his heart’s content. If he wished, he could turn it into a modern version of one of those preindustrial castles whose ruins dotted the high borderlands. Vaun had flown over them a million times. Probably Commodore Tham would be technically breaking Commonwealth law if he actually fired any of his beams and missiles and brought down a torch and killed someone, but Commonwealth law wasn’t going to do much about an officer in the Space Patrol.
    The Patrol itself, though…that was another matter. To shoot down an