Hero! Read Free Page A

I meant later. You did expect to be recognized when you took down that smart-ass navigator—and you weren’t! You trapped him, Vaun!”
    “Pompous spacer prig! He deserved it.”
    She sighed. “It was all part of the hunt, of course. The redhead, wasn’t it?”
    Oh yes, the little redhead! He thought of the slim arms and the pale skin and the cool touch of the girl’s hand when they’d been introduced. He thought of the wide eyes, the tremor in her voice. He knew hero worship when he saw it. She’d been wetting her pants just looking at him. His desire surged, chokingly. “What red-head?”
    “Feirn, of course. All that grandstanding was just to dispose of the boy, wasn’t it? Unscrupulous as ever.”
    “What boy?”
    “Oh, Vaun! The ensign.”
    “Oh, that one? He looked too good to be true.”
    “He is too good to be true. His name’s Blade .”
    “You’re joking!”
    “No. Ensign Blade. Exercises five times a day, cleans his boots every fifteen minutes, reads textbooks in bed…and no, I don’t know that from experience. I’m extrapolating.”
    Vaun was intrigued. Could Maeve have descended to making passes at lanky, pipsqueak ensigns? Been refused, maybe?
    “Why your interest in him?” he demanded.
    She shrugged, suddenly defensive. “Nothing. I just don’t like the type. He must have other names. If he turns up again, why don’t you pull some more rank on him and order him to use another one?”
    “Such as?”
    “I don’t know. He must have several. I preferred Ephiana when I was young.”
    “Before we met.”
    “Indeed!” she snapped. “And just why do you think nobody recognized you, back there at the fire?”
    He ignored that, and moved as if to rise.
    She sighed. “Never mind. Let’s talk business. What’s all this about a Q ship?”
    “Just grandstanding.”
    “Oh, no! You meant it.” Her manner hardened. “The Cabinet hasn’t heard anything about a runaway Q ship.”
    “The Patrol isn’t about to start a panic by telling every tinpot government on the planet. But it’s common knowledge. Anyone with a com can work out that stuff I was spouting.”
    “But only a spacer would think to do so? Is there really danger?”
    “At three hundred millies? If it hits anything at all coming through the system, it’ll fry us with a burst of hard gamma and high-energy bosons. Even a civilian ought to know that.”
    “You mean the out stations, or the planet, too?”
    “If it’s close enough, the atmosphere may not shield us enough.”
    “What if it hits the planet itself?”
    “Space is very big, Maeve.”
    “You’re being evasive, Vaun. Could it?”
    Heshrugged. “Itmight. It’s coming in coplanar with the ecliptic, tangential to Ult’s orbit, so in theory it could.”
    “That sounds like a missile trajectory!” Maeve was no spacer, but she had brains and was not afraid to use them.
    “It could be.” It was. The velocity was three hundred and forty millicees, near enough—almost exactly one-third light speed. Nothing else was needed but timing, and timing was easy with a Q drive. The timing looked very nasty at the moment.
    “Vaun! How much damage would a starship do if it hit Ult?”
    “Would depend how big it was. Ships come in all sizes, and I don’t know how big this one is.”
    But he did know it had left Scyth twenty-one years ago. Nobody made long hops like that in bathtubs. It would be big.
    “Vaun, darling, you’re starting to play the Patrol’s game.”
    The darling made him want to puke. “Am I? All right. It’s holding a standard cruising speed, roughly nine thousand times Ult’s escape velocity. Say four thousand times as fast as an average meteorite.”
    Maeve said, “Shitty shoes!”
    He’d forgotten that stupid, juvenile expression. He felt an odd pang at hearing it again after so long. “And kinetic energy goes up as the square of the velocity.”
    “But four thousand squared is… sixteen million !”
    “Usually. So one ton of Q ship