Steve White - Blood of the Heroes.pdf - Steve White - widez2

Blood of the Heroes

by STEVE WHITE

Chapter One

Jason Thanou had never really cared for Earth all that much. Now, watching the blue-white-and-buff

globe wax in the observation lounge's wraparound viewscreen, he saw nothing in the spectacle to make

him forget his dislike.

So , he wondered, why am I reacting this way?

He knew he had no reason to be surprised. It was always the same, aboard a ship approaching

Earth—no other planet had the same effect, not even the planet of his birth. It came at the indefinable

moment when the mother planet, as sentimentalists called it, ceased to be away and became down —a

world and not an astronomical object. Nor did the feeling fade with familiarity; he still felt the excited

apprehension that caused the heart to race and the skin to tingle and the bowels to loosen. It never

changed. Nor was it unique to him. Most outworlders admitted to the same strange exhilaration, and

Jason had never found the others' denials convincing.

Still, he wondered why. Especially on this occasion, when he was here against his will and should by

rights have felt nothing but cold distaste.

He decided the animus and the shivers both had the same cause: the sheer, psychologically oppressive

ancientness of the place. It was a world—no, the world—that humans had not molded from barrenness

over the past few centuries (to use the Earth-standard units of time everyone still used, which was yet

another irritant). Here, the memory of billions of human lives across thousands of years permeated every

acre. History had soaked into the soil like blood—an apt simile, from what Jason knew of Earth's past,

which was quite a lot thanks to the job he'd once had. . . .

And to which he was now returning involuntarily. The resentment that had been simmering within him for

the entire voyage boiled up anew, banishing his philosophical musings and leaving only a flat dislike of

everything about this trip, especially this overripe fruit of a planet.

Jason heard a soft murmuring behind him as stewards moved among the passengers in the lounge. No

blaring announcement from an intercom—this was a pricey spaceline. That, at least, was one way he'd

been able to exact revenge. He had booked passage normally beyond his means, knowing he would

have to be reimbursed.

"Excuse me, Commander Thanou," said one of the stewards diffidently. "We are entering our final

approach pattern for Pontic Spaceport."

Jason smiled inwardly at the name of Eastern Europe's central spaceport on the steppes north of the

Black Sea, so typical of the Earth fad for reviving place names of archaic flavor. "Thank you. Has my

planetside transportation been arranged as I requested?"

"It has, Commander. You have a reservation on an aircoach departing two hours after our arrival. We

have made certain that you will arrive in Athens by midafternoon local time." The steward's courtesy,

verging on obsequiousness, went beyond the requirements of his job.

"Excellent," Jason said absently, most of his attention on the viewscreen. The north coastline of the

Mediterranean was beginning to scroll beneath the ship.

Why Athens? Jason wondered, not for the first time. Why does Rutherford want me to report to him

at his office there, and not at Service headquarters in Australia? Is it just another of his little ways

of irritating me?

Well, two can play at that game. . . .

"Thank the purser for me," he said. "And now, I think I'll return to my stateroom. I believe I have time to

change clothes before we land."

"Most certainly, Commander." The steward's attitude was reflected in the stares from Jason's fellow

passengers as he left the lounge. He'd grown used to that attitude, and those stares, since the nature of his

business on Earth had become general shipboard knowledge.

Time travelers had that effect on people.

* * *

"I assume you're trying to irritate me," said Kyle Rutherford coldly.

"Whatever do you mean?" asked Jason with an air of innocence whose bogusness was insultingly

obvious.

Rutherford merely continued to glare from behind his desk, to the left of the door which had just slid

silently shut behind Jason. Opposite the door, a virtual window provided a view of Athens from a higher

level than the office in fact occupied. The location was about right, though, peering over the Philopappos

Hill toward the Acropolis, serene in its ruined perfection, timeless . . . literally timeless as well as

figuratively so, in the temporal stasis bubble that enclosed it. The technology had come too late to protect

it from the atmospheric pollution that had almost eaten it away in the Hydrocarbon Era. But now, with

that gone, what was left stood in the unique, eerie clarity of motionless air, to be gazed at from without

rather than suffering the unintended vandalism of millions of tramping feet.

Elsewhere, the office held memorabilia. To the right, the wall opposite Rutherford's desk was covered

with photographs at which a visitor from a couple of generations back would have peered in deepening

puzzlement. Behind his desk, a display case contained various ordinary-seeming if very old-fashioned

objects . . . which, Jason decided with an inner chuckle, made it a fitting backdrop for Rutherford.

"You know what I mean!" Rutherford finally blurted. He nearly forgot to speak in the pedantic accent

affected by Earth's intelligentsia when addressing outworlders and other vulgarians.

"Oh, this." Jason pretended to finally notice the target of Rutherford's glare. He glanced down at the

uniform he was wearing—field gray, with facings of silver-edged dark green, very much in a traditional

quasi-military style. "I am entitled to wear it, you know, being an active-duty officer of the Hesperian

Colonial Rangers."

The irony was that he hadn't worn it in . . . he'd forgotten how long. The difficulty of getting the Rangers

into uniforms was so proverbial that it had become a point of pride with them. They even added their

own flamboyant individual touches to the starkly utilitarian and unmilitary-looking field versions. Only on

very special occasions, and under extreme duress, could they be induced to put on the service dress kit

in which Jason now stood, and on which he had lavished a hitherto well-concealed capacity for spit and

polish.

"I must beg to correct you," said Rutherford in a voice as frosty as his thinning hair and neatly trimmed

Vandyke beard. "You're in the Temporal Service."

"Not any more!"

"I call your attention to the agreement by which you were permitted to take extremely early retirement

from the Service—specifically to Part VI, Article D, Paragraph 15, Subparagraph—"

"Yes, yes, I know! The errand boy you sent to Hesperia explained it to me in great and loving detail." In

fact, Jason had known about the deliberately inconspicuous clause all along. He had just never dreamed

it would actually be invoked.

Rutherford permitted himself a tight little smile of constipated triumph. "Well, then, you understand that

the Temporal Regulatory Authority has the right to reactivate you under certain special circumstances.

Those circumstances have now arisen, and the right has been exercised. The Hesperian planetary

government has placed you on temporary detached duty with the Service."

"Not of my own free will!"

Rutherford sighed theatrically. "Let us have done with this nonsense. I recall very well that you quit the

Service five years ago in some childish fit of pique, and returned to your homeworld in the . . . oh, what

system is it?"

"Psi 5 Aurigae," Jason ground out between gritted teeth. Pretended inability to remember which colonial

system was which was yet another grating affectation of Rutherford's type of Earthman.

"But of course. At any rate, you rejoined that system's paramilitary constabulary, from which the Service

had previously recruited you for your—" Rutherford looked like he had bitten into a bad pickle

"—undeniable talents. Evidently you had decided that nursemaiding terraformers and tracking down

smugglers of forbidden nanotechnology and rescuing thrill-seekers were more rewarding than the

opportunity you had previously been afforded to do something important ."

Jason thought of his homeworld, on the outer fringes of the human diaspora, as yet raw and unfinished

and needing so much, especially law and order. There—in contrast to this fossilized world—human effort

could still make a difference for the future. But he chopped off an angry retort and put on the insolent

smile he knew was expected of him.

"Hey, some of those thrill-seekers are young and female . . . and you'd be amazed how grateful they can

be for getting rescued! Besides, if memory serves, quitting the Service wasn't purely my idea. Come to

think of it, you were the one who pointed that out to me. I seem to recall words like 'disrespect' and

'flippancy.' "

"True enough. I wasn't too terribly devastated to see you go, nor were certain others in the Authority

whose age and learning and experience you were apt to disparage."

"Then why inflict my bad attitude on yourselves by hauling me back now?"

"I'll not insult your intelligence by claiming to be overjoyed to see you. Indeed, I would not have agreed

to reactivating you had there been any alternative. Oh, and please do take a chair."

"I'd prefer to stand. And why is there no alternative to me?" Jason leaned over Rutherford's desk and

made himself be reasonable and even ingratiating, for he thought he glimpsed a possibility of talking his

way out of this. "Come on, Kyle! What can I possibly contribute that would outweigh the disadvantage

of having someone on the team whose heart isn't in it? You know how I feel about—"

"Yes, I remember your vehemence about the oppressive weight of history that presses down on Earth."

Rutherford took on a look of smug vindication. "Well, then, this is just the mission for you! You're going

to see Earth before most of that history had happened—Earth when it was young. Slightly more than four

thousand years younger than it is at present, in fact."

Without recalling having done it, Jason found that he had sat down. "Would you care to explain that

statement?"

"Certainly." Rutherford leaned forward, and his eyes glowed with an avidity that made him almost

sympathetic. "We want you to lead an expedition to observe the volcanic explosion of Santorini in 1628

B.C. and its aftermath."

All at once, Jason's resentment was forgotten. " What? But . . . how?"

"Yes, I know, it is incomparably further back than we have ever sent humans before. But there have

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