J f bone, p.1
J. F. Bone, page 1
Scanned by Highroller.
Proofed by a ProofPack Proofer.
Re-proofed & re-formatted by nukie.
Made prettier by use of EBook Design Group Stylesheet.
* * *
Color: -1- -2- -3- -4- -5- -6- -7- -8- -9-
Text Size: 10— 11— 12— 13— 14— 15— 16— 17— 18— 19— 20— 21— 22— 23— 24
Legacy
by J.F. Bone
* * *
Table of Contents
CHAPTER I
CHAPTER II
CHAPTER III
CHAPTER IV
CHAPTER V
CHAPTER VI
CHAPTER VII
CHAPTER VIII
CHAPTER IX
CHAPTER X
CHAPTER XI
CHAPTER XII
CHAPTER XIII
CHAPTER XIV
CHAPTER XV
CHAPTER XVI
CHAPTER XVII
CHAPTER XVIII
CHAPTER XIX
CHAPTER XX
CHAPTER XXI
* * *
CHAPTER I
^ »
I sat in a dark corner of the Officer’s Club at the Base Hospital on Gakan, eyed Peter Krasna enviously, and tried to drown my troubles in something that the club steward called a “pain expeller.” It didn’t work.
Pete was a round faced blonde with limpid blue eyes that shone with innocence he did not possess. A man doesn’t get the diamond cluster in a two bit police action like Gakan without doing something brave and unusual. He was an ex-flyboy, a jet jockey who had been a one man gang before he ran into an orbital mine. After that he became the pride and joy of the surgical staff at the base hospital. I headed the team that gave him his new legs and right arm. Pete had been a basket case when he arrived, but tissuebank, cell regeneration, and grafts provided him with limbs and organs that functioned almost as well as those he had lost. He’d never fly in combat again, though his responses were fast enough for normal living, but not fast enough to slam a jet through the substratosphere at Mach 4 speed.
He was miserable as only a grounded flyer can be, and I envied him so much that the feeling shimmered in the air between us. I knew what he had been through, but I also knew what lay ahead of me. Even in this year of grace 4205 in the 728th year of the Confederacy, radiation injuries took time to heal. We had good techniques, but they were reserved for Zone of the Interior hospital, not hard-scrabble outposts like Gakan.
I hated my world of surgeons, pathologists, dermatologists, nurses and orderlies. I was a living exemplar of the old cliché about doctors being impossible patients. The new staff treated me with the deferential indifference reserved for rankers who are no longer part of the team. I was something to be feared but not respected. I was the one with half a face, the gargoyle. I was the one who hid behind a syntheskin mask with a furnace burning inside my skull.
It was Krasna who kept me even partly sane. He had been far worse off than I, but he never lost his gallows humor. He never once treated me with that sickening deference-revulsion attitude that made me want to strangle the one who showed it. When I felt low, he laughed at me. When I felt good he laughed with me. There wasn’t a sympathetic nerve in his body. He treated me as a friend, nothing more, nothing less, and I loved him for it.
He gave me the courage to face myself. I had always been a bit vain about my chiseled features and masculine beauty. But that was gone now. My right profile was all right, but my left was horror. I could still see through the cauliflower masses that were my eyelids. The lumpy skinless pinkness that was my cheek still enclosed my teeth and tongue, my warped jaw could still move, and the fissured blob that was my left ear still received sound. Functionally I was operative, but that didn’t make me feel any better.
What was worse was the knowledge that all of this was my own fault. I didn’t have to go on that Hill 256 caper. I’d been in the service long enough to know that the way to get along was to keep your mouth shut, your bowels open, and never volunteer for anything, yet I’d volunteered! Then I had to compound the stupidity by acting like a six month wonder fresh from basic training. I could have used a periscope to look at the action instead of sticking my head up in front of God and everybody, begging to get it shot off. I should have known someone would oblige.
During the past year while we had been engaged in bringing a decent respect for the laws of the Confederation to a planetful of clever, treacherous, stinking saurians, my entire combat experience had been a divisional reserve action against an entrapped pocket of lizards that the assault echelons had bypassed. Rumor had it that the fighting was nearly over and that the whole police action would be settled in a few more days. Naturally, my combat conditioning was kicking holes in my morale. So when the word went out that a medical team would be needed for the Hill 256 mop-up, I volunteered to go.
I headed the Air Group of a demi-battalion beefed up with eight Mark IX heavies just in case the Geeks were dug in too deep to be unearthed by more conventional means. Nine teams out of ten it would have been as safe as sitting in chapel. It was just my filthy luck that we ran into a bunch of diehards.
Our troops deployed quickly and smoothly. The Mark IX’s floated into position and dug themselves in. My people set up the Aid Station and broke out the platforms and the litters, and two men from the propaganda section moved in with us and began gabbling and hissing in Gakanian over a dozen remote speakers that they had planted with launchers. The Geeks were having a time of it trying to neutralize the speakers with fire. As far as I could gather, the propaganda team was spouting the standard “surrender and you’ll be well treated” stuff that had about as much appeal as a soap commercial. The Geeks were well dug in and weren’t about to surrender without a fight. Quite probably it would be token combat, since the backbone of their resistance was broken and they were surrendering in droves after exchanging a few face-saving volleys. But with Geeks, face is important, and they had their own code of honor.
No one should have gotten hurt, but somebody didn’t pass the word to the sniper post on their left flank. I stuck my head up to get a better look at what was going on, and that lizard damn near took it off. If I hadn’t been wearing a helmet he would have. As it was, most of the energy bounced off my left cheek plate, but some got through. From the heat and pain, I thought it was a first degree jolt, which made me coffin bait, and I remember some foggy idea that since I was dead anyway, I might as well go out in style. But more than that I was filled with a blind rage at the Geeks for clobbering me. After that things were pretty confused.
They tell me that I grabbed a Mark VII from one of the troopers and blew that sniper right out of the ground. Then I went over the hill and down the draw with murder in my good eye and a sack of thermogrenades slung over my shoulder.
Probably the Geeks were ready to surrender. Maybe they thought I was saving face just like they were. At any rate some of their fire came close but none of it hit. I went all the way, clear up to their bunker. I dropped a grenade down the airshaft, and when the trap in back opened and geeks started to slither out, I started throwing grenades through the opening. After that I went to the next bunker, and the next, and when the smoke cleared away, there were a lot of charred lizards and I owned Hill 256.
The assault wave came up just after I threw the last grenade. The lieutenant took one look at me and started yelling for a medic. At the time, the irony was lost on them as on me. I was the only medic within a dozen kilometers.
My men rushed me back to Base Hospital, but the staff could do nothing except block off the burned area, inject mutagens and pray. I don’t think they believed much in the efficacy of prayer because the next morning a four comet General with GHQ tabs on his collar visited my bed in the critical ward, made a little speech about heroism and presented me with the Reward for Merit. It seemed that I had performed one of the outstanding bits of heroism of the entire police action. The Reward for Merit is the top decoration the Armed Forces can give. Practically no one gets it while they are still alive. In fact, the RM is called Rigor Mortis by almost everyone in the service. My guess is that the powers-that-be thought I was too badly cooked to survive, and figured that the RM would be a nice gesture to keep my last hours happy.
Instead, it made me mad. Right then I decided to stay alive and use some of the perquisites an RM gives the lucky man who lives after getting it. I was being perverse, because I had no illusions that I had earned the decoration. I hadn’t. I was blind with rage, not with courage.
The courage came after I passed the crisis and rejoined the living. The slow presurgical clearing of rayburned flesh isn’t pretty. Until normal tissue grafts manage to breed out the damaged cells, there is no sense in doing anything except implanting pinch grafts. Plastic surgery is out of the question. The whole process is painful and frustrating, and the periodic trimming of exuberant tissue is agony even under anesthetic.
And to make it worse, two days after I was burned, the geeks rolled their pink bellies upward, waved their scaly limbs in the air and surrendered.
So here we were, Pete and I, two pieces of flotsam in the effluent of war. Sooner or later one of us would leave and the other would be alone.
Logistics was probably behind that brutally brief order I had received this morning that told me I was being invalided out of the service, but would be retained as a patient until my wounds had healed sufficiently to permit my return to civilian status. No thanks for services rendered, no regrets, no farewells,—nothing.
Both Pete and I were comfortably oiled bef
I blinked. It always surprised me that Pete could tell what was going on behind my mask. “I’ve had it,” I said. “I have my termination orders.”
“Well, what did you expect?” was his unfeeling answer. “Did you think that the Confederation would make an exception in your case and support you forever?”
“I suppose not, but it’s damned unfair of them to take the best years of my life, condition me to battle and violence, and then toss me out on my can just because I get shot up doing the thing I was programmed to do.”
“That’s the way the system works,” Pete said. “Besides, you went psycho the first time you looked in a mirror after you got burned. The service can’t have you breaking mirrors from here to Earth just because you don’t like yourself.
He changed the subject. “When are you shipping out?” I thought I detected an odd softness of tone in his voice that was out of character. It smacked of pity, and I hated pity like poison. But Pete was incapable of pity. He took things as they were. That’s why I liked him.
I shrugged. “I don’t know. The orders say the first appropriate transportation. I suppose I’ll go on a transport to Earth or one of the Inner Worlds where there is a ZI hospital. They won’t turn me loose on society until I’m passable.” I drew my finger across my throat. “It could take years.”
“Maybe we’ll ship in together,” Pete said. “They might want me along to keep you calmed down.”
“No way. You’ll be gone for weeks before they let me out of here. There’s still plenty of primary work to do, and it probably will be done here. My orders have an open end date based on a civil life fitness classification. That’s going to take time.”
Pete nodded. “Yeah, guess you’re right. But it’d be nice if we went starhopping back together. I’ve gotten used to you.”
The conversation died. There wasn’t much reason to continue it any further; so I let it fall on its face and change into one of those long black silences that marked our friendship. We sat at the table, drinking steadily, satisfied with each other’s company. Time passed.
A pair of Military Government officers walked past our table. One turned and looked at me for a moment before he went away. A mask always makes one wonder what’s behind it.
“You know,” Pete said as he scowled at their departing backs, “I didn’t mind the fighting. I didn’t even mind too much getting busted by that mine, but these emgee lice make me sick to my stomach. I can’t take them. I’ll bet the sons of bitching cockroaches have been waiting in the cracks for the past year, waiting for us to clean out this mess so they could come out of their holes and lap up the gravy.”
He had something there. Military Government personnel did look like roaches in their spotless shiny brown uniforms. Like Pete, I regarded them with contempt. They are teachers rather than conquerors. They are the personification of Confederation government; honest, dilatory, stupid and bureaucratic. They are about as far from combat troops as it is possible to get, and for good reason. No occupied population should be made to endure occupation and governance by invasion forces. Incident would pile on incident and would reinforce the hatred and humiliation which a conquered people always feel toward their conquerors. With emgees, the population usually feels superior to the occupiers. It creates a better social climate; one that will accept reform rather than revolt.
Pete was elaborating on the roach theme, and as he warmed to his work his voice got louder and more profane. Presently it got too loud. A broad beamed emgee light colonel at the bar turned in steatopygous dignity to locate the origin of the scatology and slander, and when he saw Pete’s captain’s insigne, he became wrathful.
Chubby slipped off his bar stool, waddled briskly over to where we sat and commenced chewing on Pete. It was laughable, principally because the glob was serious and didn’t realize that he was a natural comic. We sat there enjoying ourselves. It was all very friendly, and might have come off quite well if the poor fool had left well enough alone. But Chubby didn’t have the sense to quit while he was ahead. After awhile he stopped being funny and became annoying.
“Knock it off,” Pete said. “You bore me.”
I admired Pete’s restraint, but the expression on the emgee’s face was so pratfall comic that I added a chuckle from the shadows. It wasn’t a nice sound, but that could be blamed on the keloids that occluded my chuckle mechanisms.
Chubby’s mouth opened and stayed that way for an appreciable time. His complexion turned from pink to purple, and I had the detached clinical feeling that I was observing the beginning of apoplexy.
“You and your Hallowe’en masked friend—” he began.
My detached feeling vanished. Suddenly I had a deep personal interest in Chubby’s future. “That does it,” I said. I rose to my feet, knocked over the table and reached for him with unfriendly hands…
* * *
CHAPTER II
« ^ »
After an attempt to courtmartial me fizzled, Headquarters shipped me off Gakan so fast that I was certain it was a dream. I was glad to get out of there. Krasna had been shipped out some time ago while the emgees tried to find some charges against me that would stick, and when they finally discovered that I was the provoked party, a patient undergoing therapy and an RM besides, they gave up and packed me out in a plush ship on the circle route. They probably thought the the delay getting home would be good for my soul.
I spent almost a month of objective time on the liner. We stopped at strange ports of call, some of which I had never heard of. It gave me a new perspective on the Confederation. Most of the worlds we stopped at were human dominant, which was the result of our discovery of a practical and inexpensive star drive and our explosion into space two millennia ago. However, some were not human dominant in any sense of the word.
Interesting as the trip sometimes was, I was thoroughly bored with spaceflight by the time the annunciator gargled “Earth” and an orderly came into my cubicle to help me with my gear. The ports in the common room were unsealed and I watched us slowly approach a huge way station anchored to the crust of an enormous mass of rock that filled the vision ports.
I’d heard rumors that the Engineers were going to put Ceres into a low orbit around Earth to serve as a more efficient way station than Luna, which was too big, and too far from the planet’s surface; but I hadn’t realized that they had already done the job. I looked, fascinated by the skills of modern engineering, until the scene blanked out and was replaced by the massive girders of the landing dock.
There was a lump in my throat as I passed through the airlock and into the station. In my mind’s eye I could see the great blue atmosphere shell of earth curving overhead stippled with puffball clouds. I could feel the familiar pull of one gravity on my bones and muscles. I could breathe the good clean air and smell that indescribable odor which is Earth and which is part of every man who leaves her.
I’m no spaceman. I like my feet firmly planted on the soil of a planet, and my eyes focussed on something other than painted steel walls. My spirits rose with every step I took down the exit ramp toward the station. Soon I would see my homeworld.
And then, of course, the dream was spoiled. Sure—I’d be able to walk on Earth again, breathe the air, feel the weight, look upon the ancient works of men and on men themselves. But what good was it to me? I was still hideous, and there were months, perhaps years of repair ahead of me. There would be horrified eyes, pitying eyes, repelled eyes, and fascinated eyes looking at me. Earth was an administrative center, not a raw frontier world that was accustomed to supply the soldiers of the Confederacy, and receive back the wounded and the war weary.
All of a sudden, I didn’t want to go down to Earth. I didn’t want to become a spectacle. I would be better off parsecs from here. I entered the great common room illuminated with filtered sunlight and hesitantly, almost fearfully, looked up through the glassite observation dome at Earth.
