Hero! Read Online Free

everything, Vaun, everything any boy could ever ask for, yet you’re still hunting for something, and I never did know what, and now, tonight…I meet you again and I see you’re still hunting, and I want to know what for ?”
    The singing was making him sweat. He needed to scream.
    “So now we’re into mind probing?” he shouted. “Well, I assure you that I have everything I want from life. And that includes changing the girl when I change the sheets. I just like it that way.”
    Maeve’s expression was shadowed. “You want me to locate the redhead for you?” she asked softly.
    Why did she have to bring that up? He wanted out fast; and he wasn’t going to take any favors from Maeve. “Taken up pimping as a sideline?” he snapped.
    He saw her wince as he spun on his heel and strode away into the darkness.
     
    A S SOON AS he was out of earshot, Vaun began to run. The path was bright in the Angellight, and there were small glow lamps wherever the tree cover was heavy. It wasn’t just the singing. He desperately wanted to be away from Maeve, although he wasn’t sure why. He didn’t want to know why.
    A sim imaged in at his side, a girl in simple livery running with him. “You wish transportation, sir?” It wasn’t panting like him. Sims didn’t sweat, either.
    He told it to bugger off, and it vanished. He went on alone, climbing steadily, listening to his feet pad on the pathway and the steady, strong beat of his heart. The sounds of merrymaking dwindled mercifully away.
    The grade was gentle. He moved easily, enjoying the exertion in the hot fall night, thinking about the Q ship. Maeve assumed that the Patrol would deal with the problem. That was what the Patrol was for, wasn’t it?
    Everyone thought that way about the Patrol.
    He could remember when he’d thought that way, too.
     
    M EMORY…BACK IN Doggoth, a skinny recruit stands in a stuffy classroom with forty other skinny recruits, packed tight together, all shifting minutely from foot to foot and trying not to fidget in their unfamiliar uniforms. Collars cut at necks, boots pinch toes—and that particular recruit has never worn boots before. Somewhere machinery hums, rubbing on auditory nerves like sand. Everyone smells of soap, all scrubbed to the quick, and the boys’ faces have been depilated raw. On a platform up front, a flat-voiced officer pontificates with well-rehearsed sincerity as he delivers the official welcoming lecture.
    He tells the Legend, and calls it History, and Recruit Vaun listens and believes with the others. Humanity evolves and grows to knowledge, trapped on a single world! Humanity discovers that not all quasars are distant galaxies, that some of them have proper motion among the stars and must be artifacts! Humanity reinvents the Q drive! Humanity strikes outward from ancestral Earth to inquire what beasties already voyage among the stars…
    Not aliens . Not sentients . We of the Space Patrol call them beasties . And don’t you forget it.
    There are no beasties near Ult.
    Except politicians, of course.
    You laugh when an officer makes a joke.
    Louder!
    That’s better.
    Behind the explorers come the settlers, and the Empire of Mankind spreads outward through the galaxy.
    But Q ships are potentially deadly, and they fly blind. Someone will have to control the traffic, for ancestral Earth has just as many petty, potty governments as Ult, or Bethyt, or any other of the million worlds. And so…And so the Space Patrol is formed, an organization dedicated to running the Q ships and keeping open the spaceways, an organization above planetary politics, servant of all humanity, owing allegiance only to High Command, back at the Center.
    This is the Legend, but the officer calls it History, and the forty-one believe him. Recruit Vaun is part of thirty centuries of tradition! Recruit Vaun feels his bony chest swell with pride. His pulse beats in march time. Recruit Vaun swears sacred oaths to himself that he will be