Heritage of Flight (20 page)

The ones who Ordered told them it didn't matter where they served; they'd be indoctrinated and briefed while under stass. But no system was the same. Good pilots learned to study each one during waketime ... from the asteroids of the Wolf System, which they had used first as a shield against the defenses of the fifth world, then as a bombardment ... to the treacherous variable binary in the last system they'd fought in, where they'd lost two groups to a spectacular stellar flare. Those groups had cut it too close, the brothers had agreed. The Republic had no use for bad timing.

"We've Jumped,” Aesc said.

No battle? That was strange. Curious, Thorn swung his legs off his pallet and turned to help the others. Hagl was always slower to wake; Feoh was usually shaky, hungrier than the others due to slightly higher adrenaline production. Which made sense, of course: he flew point. Wyn, a double for Feoh; Kaon, about the same as Thorn himself, and the one who looked most like him.

In training, they had been shown holos of their genefather Halgerd, who had created the groups, and they had been told that since they were specially honored in being made from his line, much would be expected of them. Thorn had always longed to meet Halgerd, who used their enemies to gain knowledge, and then came back to the Republic to share it. He had studied what he could find, which wasn't much; it wasn't needful for pilots to know much beyond their ships, flight, armscomp, and their duty to the Republic. If he'd strayed into unauthorized data, he might have been reported—and that would have harmed his brothers too. Most of what pilots needed to know, they learned in the tanks, loaded into memory through their links. But pride in Halgerd was a thought he'd had all on his own.

They were all awake now, assisted by the medical officers to a table and fed their restoratives. In the room beyond, Thorn smelled food, and grinned at the others, a grin reflected on each nearly identical face. The cascade of sensory impressions had to be what born-humans described as intoxicating. As the restorative heated his belly, the awareness that linked the brothers in combat and always let them touch woke fully, and they were one, basking in one another's mere existence. It was good that they had all survived that long. Granted, they were weapons in the Republic's hand, to be expended for the sake of those who birthed them, but...

"Sacred Band,” whispered ben Yehuda, who had let himself in during the prisoner's drug-induced report. In response to the others’ questioning looks, he added, “A ... rather specialized Theban unit on Earth about 3M back. It was composed of paired men who had sworn to die before they abandoned one another."

"Men!” Rafe grimaced.

Sterile, fixated on one another, on themselves, given the fact that they were all clones of the same person, such a group had no use on a world where increased population and genetic diversity were required. But as human weapons ... Pauli shuddered and tried to find a more comfortable position. A cramp twisted in her entrails. Just her luck if she'd started labor.

Suddenly she shivered again. The pilot had mentioned Wolf IV. God, had he been mixed up in the raid on Lohr's homeworld? She looked up just in time to see the door slide quietly shut. Lohr was expert in his comings and goings, he'd had to be. She wanted to check on him now, and if he had eavesdropped (which was likely), to comfort and control him—but Thorn had started mumble again, and she dared not leave here, with his tale unheard. She started to rise, but the cramp stitching itself across her belly again warned her against movement.

Rafe glanced at her sharply, and she squeezed his hand.

"Go on,” she told Pryor.

13

"On your feet,” snapped one of the medics as the first officer walked in. Thorn tried not to stare at him; he was regular crew: born, not decanted, unique, not one of a group. Surely the first officer understood that Halgerd group were pilots, not to be distracted from their tasks. But here they were, wakened from the protection of stasis in mid-Jump, brought to face a true-human who bore marks of fatigue and stress that pilots never carried. Pilots died in space, or rested secure in their stasis tanks.

As the first officer finished speaking, Thorn's brothers exchanged glances. They had Orders now, and Orders were never to be protested. Strangeness resonated in the link: so very strange that so many true-humans had been killed. Had the other pilot groups failed them? Then it was justice that the surviving groups must serve watches, must leave their protection and work side by side with true-humans. They all looked to Aesc, who was as used to such contact as any groupmate ever got. Aesc would help them adapt.

"They briefed me before reviving the rest of you, brothers,” Aesc said. “This is an honor they're giving us. We are Halgerd, therefore judged most capable to serve.” Pride flashed briefly through the link, followed by apprehension.

Feoh started to look shaky all over again. “It's all right,” Aesc comforted him, hands kneading his shoulders. “Medcrew has tranquilizers for you until the stimuli no longer overpower you. You'll get used to them. We are Halgerd. We can adapt."

"Is that all?” Feoh asked. “The only reason?” His eyes slid wistfully to the sliding door that hid the safe, comforting tanks from them.

"What's that to you?” Aesc snapped, unusually harsh on Feoh, whose perceptions were generally as sharp as his nerves. “We have our orders."

"Not all,” Thorn Halgerd mumbled. “Not ... not all..."

"You have your Orders, your duty shifts, your medications for whenever the stress gets too bad. What else do you need, Thorn? What else can you want?” Alicia Pryor asked, and stepped up dosage.

Boring, that's what it was. Boring had always been just a true-human denotation, but now Thorn had a referent for it. Like spending tank-time wide awake, with sights and sounds and smells added. There were duty-shifts, but there were also long periods of time that the true-humans described as “hurry up and wait."

Thorn had sat waiting until, “Come on,” a true-human from CompCentral told him. “Medical's decided that you have to do something constructive with your off-shifts, and they've asked us to see to it."

She took him by the arm—it felt strange to be touched by someone not med staff or a groupmate, let alone by a true-woman—and led him to the ship's libraries, showing him access codes for a wealth of tapes he had never dreamed existed. Glancing about almost guiltily, he noted Feoh and Hagl in nearby carrels, concentrating on tapes Thorn suspected had nothing to do with weapons or shiphandling. He sighed with satisfaction and punched up the first menu.

These tapes! As their library time increased, their dependency on the diazepam-analogs and other antistressors declined ... which, Thorn concluded with a shrewdness new to him, was probably what medical had kept in mind. At first, he had duly kept to Republic history. But gradually his fascination with the group's genefather Halgerd, creator of all the fighting groups, overcame his guilt and so obsessed him that he had scanned all the available biographies on the databanks.

Once he exhausted them, he discovered Freki, Halgerd's home, with joy, got quietly, tearfully drunk on its proud, plangent songs of victory, even in death, and shivered at its history. The deep inlets, the echoing mountains and twilights that Halgerd longed for in his years of exile among the enemies lured him too until, inevitably, the moment came when he started to think of Freki as his homeworld as well. The way Thorn might choose a weapon (but with a strange new tenderness) he chose the steading he pretended was his home, his favorite animals, and the foods he liked best. He cherished this fantasy in secret, guarding it even from his brothers in the link, because he suspected that now he'd crossed the line from acceptable interest into delusion.

"I thought maybe I should report myself, but ... I couldn't bear to not-be. That never occurred to me before. And what about my brothers? For the first time, I had words to understand what they meant to me. If the medics euthanized me, what would become of them?” he asked.

Pryor touched his forehead and sent him deeper. Her fingers lingered against his hair.

Then his next delusion took root. To
be
Halgerd, who had been a giant among true-humans. Just to know what he did would be the study of a full lifetime, with no rest in the sleep of the tanks. Thorn began to study feverishly, desperately. And those too were words for which he used to have no referents.

When, in the privacy of pilots’ quarters, Aesc asked him what he had learned, he answered with evasions, then winced as unease, and a surprising, complicit guilt quivered in the linkage. Covertly he studied his brothers. How had he ever thought they looked alike? Ship's day by day, they all were diverging from their original unity, Aesc spending more time on the bridge, the others in medical, engineering, even science. Reading. Talking with true-humans, spending less time with one another.

And more than talking. He had roused from concentration so intense on a Frekan poem that he might almost have been in a tank, to overhear two true-female crewmembers.

"What difference does it make? They're not fertile; it's not as if we have to requisition anything."

"How can you talk about them as things one moment, then plan what you're planning the next?"

"How? Boredom, that's how. This eternal waiting for orders, or for the captain and first to decide how they're going to carry out whatever orders we get.” The woman was pretty, Thorn decided, slightly bemused at that awareness. And she tugged at Feoh's hand until he left his carrel and followed her out of CompCenter. The link heated with Feoh's emotions, then his act. Half the ship away, Thorn trembled.

Feoh wasn't in quarters until late that ship's night. When he returned, he was smug, full of hints and of talk about factions among the true-humans, in the Republic itself, talk which sparked a response from Wyn.

Hagl—sturdy, stolid Hagl (where had Thorn learned those words?)—banged his fist on the nearest table. “We're not supposed to question. We're pilots, weapons in the Republic's hands ... not politicians. What's the matter with you?"

"Nothing, brother mine,” Kaon murmured at his ear. “They've just gotten a little too close ... let's call it that ... to the true-humans and to some of the women at that. Or didn't you have the brains to know what you were feeling in the link?"

He and Aesc had to separate Hagl and Feoh. They all winced at the bruises.

"You know what's the matter?” Aesc asked him later. He looked as anxious as the first officer that time he'd come into Medical Center with the orders that had destroyed their peace and—abruptly Thorn understood another strange word—their innocence.

Thorn shrugged. “Too many stimuli. What can you expect? They take us out of the tanks, and—"

"We're not meant for this!” Aesc interrupted. “We're all changing. Pretty soon, none of us will be fit to fly ... and what then, Thorn, what then? They terminate pilots who can't fly!"

He started to tremble, then to cry. Maintaining override on the group's linkages was draining him, Thorn thought. He looked years older than the rest of them. Wondering at his own calm, Thorn dialed for tranquilizers. He ought to have felt Aesc's hysteria. What he felt instead was relief.

"I want him to rest before we go on,” Pryor said. “You too. You look like you'd be better for—” Her eyes narrowed as Pauli winced at another cramp and her own rotten timing.

"How long since contractions started?” the physician demanded.

"Maybe an hour or so. Get on with this, Alicia! There's one of this Thorn's group alive up there, and that distress beacon has sent a message off to him."

Pryor hesitated, and Pauli searched for arguments to convince her to proceed with the interrogation.

"I'll cross my legs or something. I promise I won't have the baby while you're interrogating him. Just hurry up, Doctor, before this Aesc-character finds us!"

"His heart's weakening—"

"He's a killer, Alicia. But so am I. As you know. Get on with it."

Pryor touched the hypo, increasing the flow of neoscopalamine.

"So you lived with the true-humans, and you didn't like what you felt, is that it?"

Thorn mumbled sleepy agreement. “Finally, though, we got orders. Aesc was so happy."

The old eagerness for battle fired his blood, yet Thorn felt strange. The part of him he'd made into Halgerd's image had a word for that.
Feigr.
He kept it to himself: fatalism was encouraged; but superstition would probably get him euthanized. That is, if the true-humans maintained proper discipline anymore. Anything could happen, had already happened. True-people had been arrested ... “They fight among themselves,” Aesc had lamented after one of his forays into bridge territory.

But they had arrived in a new system where hostile ships awaited, so they headed down for the launching bay. Before he and his brothers climbed into their ships, they bowed to the six brothers of Tojo-group, then exchanged somber, respectful nods with another group of high-cheekboned, dark-haired men he had never seen before.

Real flying again, thank God, he thought; and knew the relief and the prayer for Halgerd's mindset, not his. At last. The linkage of pilot and pilot awoke strong and clean in Thorn's mind and kindled in the others', bringing a warm, welcome sense of rightness, remembrances of excitement, of victory, and, afterward, desires assuaged.