The Trouble With Heroes.... Read online

  The Trouble With Heroes…..

  Jo Beverley

  Smashwords Edition

  (This novella was first published in the collection Irresistible Forces.)

  Copyright 2004 Jo Beverley

  Table of Contents

  The Trouble With Heroes…. A science fiction novella 25,000 words

  Some details of other SF&F fiction by Jo Beverley

  An excerpt of the upcoming historical romance, Seduction in Silk.

  About Jo Beverley

  The Trouble With Heroes…..

  By

  Jo Beverley

  Chapter 1

  Refugees.

  A dead word from the Earth history books had shockingly come to life. Jenny Hart first heard it at the print shop as she was closing her station ready to go home.

  “…a queue of refugees that goes out of sight and beyond because the gates of Anglia are closed for the first time during the day in living memory.”

  The office screen ran Angliacom most of the day and Jenny was used to treating it as background noise. It took a moment to register, but then she turned to stare at the wall. The screen was split into max cells, but Sam Witherspoon, the manager, had the volume pegged to the picture of a line of crowded vehicles on the road. Buses, lorries, even farmvees of one sort or another.

  “Refugees?” Sam echoed blankly.

  “Like from plague, famine, and war?” Jenny asked, and they looked at each other.

  She’d asked a question, but she knew. He probably knew, too.

  “The blighters,” she said.

  He turned and picked up his case. “I’d better get home. Lock up, all right?”

  “Sure,” Jenny was still staring at the screen, but she knew why he was rushing away. He had a family. Children. Probably her mother would be fretting about her.

  She picked up a phone and claimed a screen cell for it. Her mother liked to see her children when she was worried. Her younger brother’s face came on first. He took one look and yelled, “Mum! Jenny!”

  Madge Hart appeared, red hair wild, eyes flashing. “Are you all right?”

  “Of course I am, mum. I’m not outside, you know.”

  “But isn’t it awful? Those poor people. We should take them in. But they say there’s more and more, and room elsewhere. But they’ll end up out in the dark. I don’t know.”

  “It makes no difference, mum. Blighters don’t care whether it’s night or day.” All the same, Gaians didn’t like to be outside at night.

  “It’s all panic,” her mother said, clearly remembering her maternal duty to reassure her children. “If there was real trouble, we’d know.”

  “That’s right.”

  “Are you coming home for dinner?”

  “Not right now. I want to see if I can find out what’s really going on.”

  “That’s a good idea. Ask Dan. He’ll know. Bring him home for dinner as long as it’s not too late. He’s been looking peaky.”

  “Right, mum.”

  Jenny clicked off before she smiled. Her mother had fussed over Dan since he’d been a toddler, long before he’d been spotted as a fixer and sent off to the Gaian Center for Investigation and Control of the Hostile Amorphic Native Entities – generally known as Hellbane U. Now he was back and living on his own in the fixer’s flat, she acted as if he might be starving to death. It wasn’t as if he didn’t have a family of his own here.

  She powered down the screen and checked the place over, then went out, coding the lock. Where to go for news? The Merrie England pub?

  No. She wanted to go up on the walls to see for herself. God knew why. A camera did a better job than human eyes, but she was sure the walls were crowded with gawkers. The Olde English battlements and turrets had always seemed like a pleasant whimsy, but as Jenny hurried toward the nearest steps, she wished they really could keep an enemy out.

  They couldn’t. In nearly two hundred years, Anglia had only experienced one blighter attack, but one was enough to show thick walls and drawbridges were no protection at all. Sixty-eight years ago, in the lovely Public Gardens, a blighter had killed a child in front of her horrified mother. Rendered her into a pile of greasy ash amid her pink pantsuit. There were photos.

  A statue in the Gardens depicted a beautiful little girl holding a posy of flowers. Quite likely she'd been a pest, but she hadn’t deserved to die in terror like that. No one did.

  “Hostile amorphic native entities.” That was how the exploratory services had labeled the one, puzzling problem on an otherwise perfect settlement planet. HANES.

  Technically accurate, but it hadn’t captured reality. Within a generation they had become known as hellbanes, and some settlements had their own name as well. Anglia, with typical wry humor, called them blighters. No coincidence that back on Earth blight had been a disease that turned plants to slime. But the Frankland “terreurs” was perhaps a better word. Jenny could feel it now, in herself and in the people all around, milling in gossip, heading to the walls, or hurrying home to protect or be protected.

  Fear. Deep, formless fear, as if something terrible was blowing on the winds from the south.

  An arm snagged around Jenny’s waist and she whirled.

  “Gyrth!”

  Gyrth Fletcher was thin, long-faced, with blond curls and beard that made him look as if he'd stepped out of a medieval manuscript.

  "Want to come down a dark passageway with me, pet?" he asked in mock villain voice.

  She winked at him. "Depends what you're offering, don't it?"

  "A better view. From an arrow slit."

  "Lead on!"

  He worked for wall maintenance, so he’d know those passageways, but the main appeal was company. That’d blow away her creepy feelings.

  She couldn’t help stating, "There's no real danger to being outside in the dark."

  "Right.” He didn’t sound any happier than she was about it.

  "Perhaps we should go and look for Dan. He’ll know what’s going on.”

  "He's probably in a stuffy room discussing the situation with the Witan.”

  "I suppose.”

  Strange to think of Dan as official like that. They'd been born within weeks of each other three houses apart, and according to her mother, been stuck together like toffees until they reached that age when the other sex suddenly seems alien. Before they’d had time to get over that, he’d tested positive for fixing and been sent to Hellbane U.

  Bloody fixing. His three fortnights home each year hadn’t been enough to keep the closeness over eight years, especially when Jenny had known he'd not come back in the end. Fixers didn't. They went where they were needed, and they always seemed to be needed far away. Anglia's fixer before Dan had been from Cathay.

  “You all right, Jenny?”

  “Sure. Where’s this arrow slit? Perhaps we’ll be able to hear what people are saying out there."

  They held hands so they wouldn’t be pulled apart in the crowd, but Jenny was thinking about Dan. Her childhood friend. Anglia’s fixer. The one who’d be expected to deal with any blighters who invaded here. Sure, fixers trained to fight blighters, but there weren’t any. Not here, at least, or anywhere far from the equator. So they fixed other things. Broken machines. Broken bones. Broken hearts if the break was physical. Things that didn’t fight back.

  "If there's trouble in the south, do you think Dan’ll have to go to fight blighters there?" she asked.

  Gyrth stopped and shook his head at her. "Hellbane U’ll deal with it. They're not going to leave the towns without a fixer, are they? Not short of something desperate. And it can't be desperate. Didn't Dan say that blighters are so rare they have to hunt them to find one for the graduates to zap in their f
inal test?"

  "Yes, but then why the refugees?"

  "You’re such a worrier! What did that old Earth politician say? We have nothing to fear but fear itself. Come on."

  Jenny went, but asked, “Have you ever thought it’s strange that Dan came back here? Fixer’s don’t.”

  “He said once that he asked. Apparently most don’t.’ He grinned. “You’ve got to admit that a lot of times the town wishes he hadn’t. He’s a right change from quiet Miss Lixiao.”

  That he was. When Dan had left he’d been mischievous and thoughtful, and he’d come back wary and wild. It was a good wild, though, making him the burning heart of a group of lively twenty-somethings. Jenny wasn't sure she fit in with all the group, but she spent time with them because of Dan. She and he weren’t toffees anymore, but they were still friends. Friends enough to worry.

  They reached High Wall Street and the width of it meant she could let go of Gyrth's hand. Thirty feet wide, it was edged on one side by railings overlooking the lower street, and on the other by shops, pubs, and cafes that backed onto the wall. So how did they get to an arrow slit from here?

  Gyrth headed toward the space between Porter's Pies and Castleman's Ironmongery.

  “Down there?” Jenny asked dubiously.

  “It’s safe.”

  But then he stopped, waved, and shouted. Jenny saw his sister Polly and her husband Assam wave back then walk toward them. Or rather, Polly waddled. She was pregnant and bigger every time Jenny saw her. It didn't seem she could swell anymore and not burst, but she still had a few weeks to go.

  It was the first pregnancy for any of Jenny's friends and they were all watching it with fascination. Well, the women were fascinated; she thought the men were slightly appalled. It hadn't deterred them from sex, mind you, but then, no one got pregnant by accident anymore, thank heavens.

  "We're going to get a better view from a slit," Gyrth told them. "Want to come?"

  "I'll stick!" Polly protested, but in the end she and Assam went with them.

  There was no real danger of Polly getting stuck, but it was definitely single file. Rubbish crunched under Jenny's shoes, some of it stinky, and despite the fact that the ginnel was open to the sky two stories above, she began to feel trapped.

  Or perhaps the faint pulse of panic was because of refugees, blighters, and war.

  She was ready to give up and turn back when they reached the maintenance passage, wide enough for two or three. As a bonus, it was either cleaned regularly or the rubbish didn't drift this far. Gyrth led them to an arrow slit directly above the gate, one rank higher than the one being used by the officials. From here, the amplified voice was clear, though the response were indistinct.

  Driven by her strange urgency, Jenny wasn't her usual polite self. She climbed first into the embrasure and worked forward to the slit. It was six foot high but only about a foot wide. Even so, standing there the world was spread before her, and all the voices outside were clear.

  "What's going on?" Gyrth asked.

  "Someone's asking distances to Skanda."

  Jenny wished she knew how far back the queue went, but it wove out of sight between a coppice not far away.

  "Didn't they used to keep the space around castles clear,” she asked Polly, a history teacher. “So they could see an enemy coming?"

  Polly was leaning against the wall rubbing her stomach. "Certainly. But it’s not as if anyone could see a blighter coming, or stop it if they did."

  "Shame. I see how these work. I could fire arrows out at the enemy, and they wouldn't be able to hit me.”

  "Seems a bit unsporting to me," Assam said, clearly teasing his wife.

  Polly punched his arm. "War was not a sport."

  Gyrth jumped up into the space. "Let me have a look, Jenny."

  She gave way and climbed back out. There'd been nothing out there to settle whatever was bothering her.

  "I don't know about sport,” she said, joining the other two. ‘Tournaments and things. And didn't they have what they called `war games' even in recent times?"

  "Probably still do," Polly said. “They still have war, though mostly robotic. Thank heavens for peaceful Gaia.”

  Jenny rubbed her arms, suddenly cold in this dank, shadowy space. "I wish our ancestors had chosen a more peaceful design."

  "All part of good old Merrie England," Assam said.

  "Merrie? They used to pour boiling oil down on the attackers, didn't they, Polly?"

  "Well, probably not. Oil would have been expensive. But water, and sometimes pitch, which would stick."

  "Ugh!"

  "And the attackers would hurl dead cows back with catapults," said Assam, clearly enjoying himself.

  "Ugh, again. Stop it, Assam! It was bad enough learning about all this in school."

  "But very necessary," said Polly in her best teacher manner. "Lest we forget."

  Then Jenny heard the gates being opened beneath her and turned. "Are they're letting someone in, Gyrth?"

  "Yes. Must be an Anglian in the family. They can't keep native Anglians out, or their families."

  "Then I supposed I'll be able to go to Erin if things get bad here.”

  "Not unless your mother’s with you," Polly pointed out. She was always precise about such details. "And would you really want to leave?"

  "Of course not. It was just a thought."

  Jenny said it lightly. No one else seemed seriously concerned, but something was pressing on her mind. A kind of foreboding that defied words as a half-remembered dream does.

  Assam was still teasing Polly about castles. He was probably trying to amuse her, but couldn’t he see Polly was getting upset?

  "Talking of hurling cows," Jenny interjected, "do you still show that film? The grail one."

  "Monty Python and the Holy Grail?" Polly said. "Of course. It's a key work to understanding ancient Earth warfare."

  "The words `Fetchez lavache' illuminating the strife that arises out of separate languages,” Jenny said, “and the consequent misunderstandings, and also the instinctive desire for union in the creation of a blended language, franglois. I got an A+ on that paper -- mainly by paraphrasing the text books."

  "If you got an A+, you must have done more than that."

  Jenny shrugged. "I liked the film even though I didn't really understand it."

  "It is deep. I don't think we've truly grasped the meaning of shrubbery."

  "The dark warrior's need for healthy, beautiful plants rather than destruction," Assam stated. That certainly was straight from the text book.

  "I feel there's more," Polly said. "After all, we've only just made the connection that explains Monty."

  "Which is?" Jenny was glad for the distraction, even though she was beginning to feel as if she was back in sixth form history.

  "Someone recently found a film on the archive disks called The Full Monty. Monty," Polly said, with the air of one sharing an exciting treat, "turns out to mean naked!"

  "Monty Python means Naked Snake?"

  "No, no! The snake is obvious. It's the serpent in the Garden of Eden -- and that connects to shrubbery, of course. And Holy Grail is the ultimate freedom from strife to which all humanity aspires. But nakedness builds powerfully on the concept of Eden, don't you see? Nakedness in Eden -- honesty and openness -- threatened by the python of deceit."

  "Ah," said Assam, "but what about the rabbit?"

  Jenny wanted to kick him.

  Polly merely gave him a look. "We don't quite understand the rabbit yet. I think it warns that the threat to the grail, to Eden, can trick us by appearing harmless."

  "Well that rules out the blighters," he replied. "We've known they were bloody nasty since first settlement.”

  “I don’t know,” Jenny said. “I think we’d have mostly forgotten about them if they didn't keep showing school kids that film of the scout being ashed.”

  “That’s a crucial part of Gaian history,” Polly protested.

  “Maybe, but it gave m
e nightmares for weeks.”

  Assam moved closer to the embrasure. “Anything new going on there, Gyrth?"

  "Not really." Gyrth turned and climbed out. "Let's go to the Merrie. See what people are saying there."

  No one argued. They headed out, but Jenny carried gloom with her, stirred by memories of that scout’s death.

  Settlement was always preceded by exploration and the first visitors, the scouts, wore full recording equipment that sent real time data to the ship. New worlds are unpredictable, after all, and corpses don't tell what killed them.

  In this case, the data told the tale but left a mystery. Even though the sys-suit recorded 360 degrees, it had shown nothing, absolutely nothing, of what had attacked. The various sensors had recorded no change in air pressure, temperature, or radiation.

  The body system readouts, however, had charted extreme stress -- a racing heart, rapid breathing, and sky-high adrenalin and blood pressure. The scout had gasped and expressed terror, but she'd screamed only once, at the point of death. The oblivious sys-suit had kept on recording even when the person inside had become a pile of ash, but it had registered as little after the event as before.

  Hostile Amorphic Native Entity.

  Jenny could imagine how often that data disk had been viewed and reviewed, but in the end Gaia had been approved for settlement. There'd been no further incidents, and in all other respects it was the best EPP -- Earth Potential Planet -- ever found.

  Climate, air and water needed little amendment, and it was rich in rare earths to provide economic security. It had even been strangely free of anything close to a sentient species that might complicate ownership. It had no large native species at all.

  That still puzzled the scientists, but it had made Gaia perfect.

  Yes, Gaia was perfect, but when they returned to the space and bustle of High Wall Street, Jenny sucked in a deep breath. She’d not thought she was claustrophobic.