Hero! Read Online Free Page B

Vaun had been viewing Tham’s retreat and the Q ship as two unrelated problems. Perhaps the running was clearing his head, for suddenly he decided that that was altogether too much of a…
    A sim imaged in his path, a girl in a security uniform, with a gun on its hip. It glowed faintly, so that he would see it under the trees, and it held up a hand to stop him.
    “Sir…”
    Some trick of Maeve’s, trying to make him stay? Not likely.
    Without a word, he ran right through the illusion and kept on going. Mirages couldn’t hurt him. Mirage guns couldn’t hurt him. Pants and shirt stuck coldly to his skin now, and his heart was racing, but the ground had leveled off at last and he must be close to the parking lot.
    Then he heard a sudden rattle ahead of him, like dry sticks. With a stab of panic, he realized what the sim had been about to tell him.
    Idiot!
    Croaking aloud in his fear, Vaun sprawled to his knees on the path and ripped off his shirt.
     
    K RANTZ! WHAT AN idiot!
    Most of the crops and all of the vertebrates on Ult had been imported by mankind. The native life-forms were all primitive, and yet there was one species that came dangerously near to sentience. That rustling close ahead of Vaun was the sound of a pepod.
    If he had blundered into its privacy radius, then he was dead, and he would take a lot of other people with him. The rattle came again, sickeningly close. He curled over until his forehead was almost touching the ground, holding his forearms alongside his thighs to cover the cloth. The position was not dignified, and it made panting damnably hard, but it was the only way to face pepods. Either they regarded clothes as a threat, or else they enjoyed watching humans grovel.
    The chill on Vaun’s back was fear and cooling sweat mixed. Mostly fear. Sweat trickled down from his armpits. Idiot!
    Rattle…To the eye, a pepod was an armchair-sized bush of hard twigs, but those twigs were pseudolimbs and mandibles and poison spines and eyestalks—and also antennae, for pepods had a germanium-silicon metabolism, and communicated by high-frequency radio. How close? The size of the defended area depended on the size of the unit itself. When a pepod felt threatened, it assembled all the others within range into a group organism and they all went berserk together.
    Pebbles clinked, but Vaun was still alive.
    Gravel dug into his knees and he smelled the cold earth.
    Suddenly a voice whispered in his ear. Possibly a sim was bending over him—he did not look up. “The quasisentient commiserates on your elevated body temperature, sir.” Security was translating the radio jabber.
    Vaun was shivering, but the pepod would be viewing him in far-infrared. Pepods favored the southern hemisphere, which was colder, and they disliked Angel, the supermassive star that warmed northern winters. In a few thousand years it would have drifted away, and the pepods would again inherit the planet.
    “Inform the beastie that I also express my sympathies on the unpleasant weather.”
    “I have done so. It wishes you good grazing.”
    Vaun risked raising his head a little, to ease his neck. “Give it a suitable acknowledgment. Can I get up yet?”
    “In a moment, sir. I congratulated it on its melodious song. It is moving away from the path, sir.”
    As Vaun sat up and fumbled to find his sodden shirt, he felt fury replacing his fear. Pepods were an unpredictable hazard and also a real nuisance. Of necessity, the law everywhere protected them from molestation, but simple radio screamers would keep them away from human settlements. Why would Maeve tolerate a pepod on her grounds?
    The only reason he could think of, as he stalked angrily on up the track, was that there were always pepods around Valhal.
    V AUN’S FAVORITE TORCH was a standard Patrol K47—a seat on a star, as the old song said—but his had been considerably souped up before he had acquired it, and he had added a few improvements since. The bench, for example,