Heritage of Flight

Susan Shwartz

Author's Note

Several parts of
Heritage of Flight
have been modified from their original appearance in
Analog Science Fiction/Science Fact
. These are “Heritage of Flight,”
Analog,
April 1983, and “Survivor Guilt,”
Analog
, February 1986.

Copyright Acknowledgments

From
Wartime Writings 1939-1944
by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, copyright © 1982 by Editions Gallimard; English translation copyright © 1986 by Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, Inc. Reprinted by permission of Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, Inc.

From “Ash Wednesday” in
Collected Poems 1909-1962
by T. S. Eliot, copyright 1936 by Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, Inc.; copyright © 1963, 1964 by T. S. Eliot. Reprinted by permission of the publisher.

To Dr. Stanley Schmidt, editor of
Analog,

with thanks, for patience, hard work, bad puns and making up for the fact that I never got to meet John Campbell.

ACKNOWLEDGMENT

I'd like to thank Dr. Dean Lambe, Robert Adams, and Sandra Miesel as well as the following organizations: the information offices of the United Nations, NASA, and the U.S. Army (with special thanks to Lieutenant Colonel Paul Knox); the Futurists II Workshop of 1985, Wright-Patterson Air Force Base; and the Schomburg Institute for Afro-American Studies.

...We have chosen to save peace. But in saving peace we have harmed our friends. And no doubt, many among us were ready to risk their lives in the interests of friendship and now feel a kind of shame. But if they had sacrificed peace, they would feel the same shame; because they would then have sacrificed humanity: they would have accepted the irretrievable destruction of the libraries, cathedrals, and laboratories of Europe. They would have accepted the ruin of its traditions and transformed the world into a cloud of ashes. And that is why we shifted from one opinion to the other. When peace seemed threatened, we discovered the shame of war. When it appeared that we were to be spared from war, we felt the shame of peace.

—ANTOINE DE SAINT-EXUPERY

"La Paix ou la Guerre,"

Paris-Soir
, Oct. 2—4, 1938.

PART I

Planetfall

We go to gain a little patch of ground

That hath in it no profit but the name.

—WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE,

Hamlet
, IV, iv, 18—19.

1

Realspace shimmered, elongated, then twanged back into existence, taking Pauli Yeager with it. The boards of her ridership, too painstakingly maintained to be new, blurred, then solidified once again.
Bad transit
, she judged. She shook herself mentally, then glanced at the chrono. It should have begun to move as soon as they entered realspace. Reality shimmered for a fearful “instant,” then refocused. There: now the damned chrono had started up.

She put out a hand to touch the display, which gleamed ice-blue. Three seconds realtime had elapsed.
Very bad transit
. Jump was—or should be—instantaneous, however long it felt as space curved and light shifted about you. She swallowed hard, and blinked away a treacherous fog that would be the death of her if it hit when she was using armscomp. Despite lifesupport, which allegedly kept her suit at a comfortable temperature, she shivered and sweated simultaneously.

That actual time had passed ... if Jump had been this bad for her fighter and its host,
Leonidas
, which had the best of a dying fleet's diminished store of matériel, what had it been like for the refugee ships
Daedalus
and
Sir Jeffrey Amherst?

Before her transfer to
Leonidas
as a senior pilot—and that seniority was a laugh, if anything about this damned war qualified as laughable—she'd served aboard the
Amherst
. That had been temporary duty, another in the frustrating chain of TDYs that cheated Pauli of the advanced pilot training on New Patuxent she'd been wild for since the war had stepped up. New Pax gave pilots the best training, and increased their chances of surviving their first scramble. And if Exploration, the service she had wanted to enter, was no longer an option, the best training was barely good enough to keep her alive.

Wouldn't you just know that the instant
Amherst
was headed toward New Pax at long last, new orders would divert them to Wolf IV, one of the slagged worlds, half charnel and half rubble, to rescue and lift out as many survivors as possible for resettlement? She couldn't complain of her luck; it was better than any on Wolf IV.

Thereafter, it seemed, they were always on the run, retreating world by abandoned world, system by ravaged system in the Net of Worlds that had linked the Alliance with Manhome Earth, a Net the Secessionists had torn through, God only knew why.

This war made Alliance and Secess’ maniacs even in retreat, fighting with the deadliness of scavengers forced against a cliff face to defend their last scrap of meat. This was not a war you could win, Pauli thought, remembering Wolf IV—the half-melted ruins, the fevered, feral survivors, and the factories stripped by raiders from both sides, desperate for components and supplies now that the production lines were gone, or going.

She glanced over her boards, which weeks of prayerful labor had raised to a semblance of their old speed. Like
Leonidas
itself, all the riderships had the best equipment they could scrounge, cajole, or steal. Why was it so important to protect refugees? Why, as the tiny convoy fled farther out and deep into the No Man's Worlds, had security intensified until the pilots rode out Jump in their fighters? At the last planetfall, Federal Security marshals had crammed onto the ships, and the pilots had hoped that they, at least, might offer some answers. But the marshals whose presence strained cramped ships’ capacities to house and feed them were saying nothing. At least, not to the pilots, though they had summoned—by God, they had ordered as if they were cadets—Captains Borodin and Ver from their own ships onto
Leonidas
for a conference. When they emerged, the captains announced that the marshals would keep order on board and serve as consultants—that elastic, treacherous term for despots pro tem, as impossible to get rid of as to question.

After that meeting, the convoy altered course. It was hard to escape the conclusion that the marshals had ordered it. Too damned many marshals, eating supplies that the refugees needed, speaking officialese to no purpose but their own, issuing random orders, seemingly for the joy of turning line officers into flunkies.

Maliciously, Pauli hoped they enjoyed their new duties: mediating between the civs, who suspected anyone in uniform of some past or future atrocity, and their refugee charges, who feared anyone at all. Most of them were children, but they were children who had learned to claw for survival. Rescue parties had found battered adult skeletons in the rubble of Wolf IV; the medics had forbade anyone to question the evacuees.

Over in the
Amherst
and
Daedalus
, refugees slept two and three to a bunk. Even the riderbays emptied by crashes and firefights had been converted to makeshift barracks for the refugees, who crouched among emergency supplies they still did not dare touch as if they hid in caves.
Leonidas
would set the medics, techs, civs, and their charges down on whatever resettlement world the marshals intended, and then Pauli would transship for New Pax and the business of fighter training. Anything that would extend her life a little longer and give her the chance to strike back at the war that had ended any hope she ever had of growing up happy, or growing up at all.

Pauli activated communications, taking bleak comfort from the renewed chatter of a ship running in realspace. Comfort that they'd survived Jump. Satisfaction that they'd made it this far. Never mind happy.
Happy
was a word like
peace
: it had book definition, but no meaning. At least not for anyone she knew. The psychs had praised her flexibility; if flexibility meant that she could adapt to this, then it was another reason for satisfaction. Happy was a dream she had before she realized how long, and how final, this war looked to be. She had to adjust to it—or die; and the same damned psychs said she wasn't a quitter.

A klaxon brayed over the ship chatter, and red light pulsed in the gloom of her cockpit. Pauli checked her boards again and cursed. So much for careful maintenance! Her ship's alarm buzzer had failed. With luck, the weapons systems wouldn't fail too. She tightened her webs and braced for the launch that hurled her ship out into space. Gravity pressed, then slacked off as she banked into formation with the rest of the riderships. The port darkened to protect her from the actinic glare of the white dwarf that circled a much larger, cooler star. Scanners showed planets in this system, planets and a dense asteroid belt. The system was too crowded to be wholly safe.

Well, what would it be this time? Secessionist ships, or some Fed Sec marshal gone even more paranoid than usual? Ambush was impossible in Jump, but betrayal—that was feasible. Pauli activated internal security scan. After all, Secess’ and Alliance had been one government once before the damned theories—expansion versus consolidation under human rule—blew apart the government, then started firestorms on the worlds themselves.

With the Net gone, patrolled by Secess', Earth was a dream of order and prosperity. Ironic, Pauli thought, that Manhome herself now had about as much meaning as the word
happy
.

Was it just the Secess', came a treacherous whisper, or had Terra chosen isolation, suspicious of friends who might, suddenly, transmogrify into enemies doubly vicious for the knowledge alliance and kinship had given them? She shivered. If she believed that—
let the Secess’ show up soon
, she prayed,
so I can forget
.

She turned eyes back to her boards. The moments between system entry and attack were always tricky. You could betray a ship, especially as systems lost backups, and even some primaries were scrapped. A hidden transmitter, and there you were, vulnerable after Jump. Then the Secess’ could emerge and strip down your ship, leaving you—if you were lucky and they were feeling kind—to limp back to whatever base might help you refit. There were fewer and fewer such bases on either side these days, Pauli thought.

She interfaced sensors with the other ships. They pressed forward, scanning, always scanning, so slowly that she felt no acceleration; on the newer riderships, you could feel G-forces build up only as you neared Jump speed. The navigation grids glowed with the patterns of ships on three axes. To her left and “up,” one veered out of formation. A quick warning, and the light that represented it blinked back into its proper position: the shift of that light and the chrono's ordered clicks were the only movements Pauli perceived.

Her breath rasped in the tiny cockpit, threatening to cloud the visor of her helmet until she adjusted temperature controls downward. Recon felt motionless; it wore on the nerves until you wanted to blast something if only to see the light slash out to break the monotony and the tension.