Anthony, Piers - Bio of a Space Tyrant 02 - Mercenary

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The author wishes to thank First Lieutenant Jim Parker for valuable advice on

certain military aspects of this novel, notably the nature and use of the

pugil sticks and the organization of a unit; and Zane Stein and Jacob Schwartz

for assistance concerning the planetoid Chiron.

Contents

Editorial Preface

1. WORRIED MAN BLUES

2. BASIC TRAINING

3. FIVE STEEL BALLS

4. CHIRON

5. MIGRANT

6. PUGIL

7. QYV

8. FIRST BLOOD

9. SURRENDER

10. RAPE

11. PRISONER

12. FINAL BATTLE

Editorial Epilog

Editorial Preface

Hope Hubris, as the prior manuscript Refugee showed, was not originally aware

of his destiny to become the all-powerful Tyrant of Jupiter. At first he was a

desperate Hispanic refugee, fleeing his home-moon of Callisto when wrongfully

charged with a crime. He saw his group brutalized and his parents murdered by

pirates and the indifference of the established powers. He lost the first

great romantic love of his life, the refugee girl Helse, to the savagery of

the marauders of the Jupiter Ecliptic. He was lucky to survive at all, and

lucky to be admitted at last as an immigrant to the peripheral off-Jupiter

society. Certainly he was unprepossessing as a person in those early days,

despite his education and intelligence.

However, his special talent with people found ready application as he entered

the Jupiter Navy, and in due course he became the redoubtable military figure

the texts describe today. That reputation was, of course, the springboard for

his subsequent civilian success in the political arena. But the conventional

descriptions omit certain vital insights, such as the influence of the

sinister QYV, his relations with certain migrant laborers and pirates, and the

frank use of social and sexual inducements to put together one of the

strangest, yet most brilliant, staffs of Naval history.

The adult Hubris was always a man for the ladies, but rumors of his

infidelities turn out to be largely apocryphal. He indulged in sex freely but

fairly, and not a single woman who knew him well ever spoke evil of him, not

even the fiery pirate wench he raped. Neither did the males of his

association; he commanded an almost fanatical respect within his unit.

Hubris, despite his superficial indifference in appearance and manner, was a

truly potent motivator of people.

Yet little of this shows in this private narrative. Perhaps it pleased him to

portray himself as the somewhat naive observer, as if others made most of his

decisions for him; or perhaps he was genuinely innocent in his private

reflections. But he was expert at delegating authority, and very little

slipped by him. Many opponents misjudged him, until it was too late, because

he understood them far more precisely than they understood him. His special

genius did not show up in the standardized tests upon which most personnel

judgments were made. Those tests never properly defined him. That, oddly, was

one of his greatest assets.

This narrative, translated from the original Spanish, should be perused with

that in mind: There was more to Hope Hubris than shows in the official

records, and more than he himself chose to present. His highly unorthodox

procedures were often the mark not of insanity but of genius. It was not,

after all, mere chance that brought him eventually to the Tyrancy.

But some few did appreciate Hope Hubris's potential early, as we shall see,

and there was one who perhaps contributed more to his success than Hope

himself did, yet who received virtually no recognition for it.

No dates are listed in this manuscript, but external evidence suggests that it

commences on or about June 1, 2615, perhaps a month after the termination of

Refugee.

Chapter 1 WORRIED MAN BLUES

I never saw it coming. I thought the man was just shoving past me from behind,

for the concourse was not wide, and then there was a hard blow to the side of

my head. I saw a flash of pain, lost my balance, fell against the wall, and

slid to the floor. The man shoved me about; I thought he was helping me to get

up, but then he was gone and I just sagged there, dazed.

I don't know how many people passed me by; I was aware of them only

peripherally, as moving shapes. I put my hand to my hurting head and found

moisture. I looked at my fingers and saw the stain of red on them: blood. I

thought about that awhile, not moving, while the foreign shapes continued to

pass.

Then a shape stopped. "Kid, I think you been mugged," he said in English.

I looked up at him. He was a poorly shaven man with short, curly light hair

and blue eyes: a fair Caucasian, rather than the dusky Latin of my own type.

More succinctly: He was Saxon; I, Hispanic. He wore faded, worn coveralls and

a sweat-stained shirt and cheap old composition shoes: a laboring man. But he

represented help, and he looked great to me, a Good Samaritan. "I think so," I

agreed.

"Check for your money," he advised, helping me to my feet with strong hands.

I checked. My new wallet was gone, and with it my money-and my identification.

I groaned. I hadn't meant to make that sound; it just came out.

"They need more patrolmen in these public places," the man said. "Someone gets

mugged just about every day. Where you going, kid? I'll help you there."

Confused, I pondered. "Looking for work," I said. "I-just checked the Navy

office, but ..." I was having trouble organizing my memory.

"Too young?" he asked sympathetically.

"Yes. He asked my age, and I said fifteen, and he said to come back in two

years. Then-"

"Then you got mugged on your way to the employment office," he finished. "It

happens. Here, let's introduce ourselves. I'm Joe Hill, migrant laborer, en

route to a new hitch as a picker."

"Hope Hubris," I said, grateful for his easy manner. Other people were shoving

by us, paying no attention. "From Callisto, refugee. I've just been granted

status as a resident alien."

Joe smiled. "I'd guessed as much. You're from that batch they just processed

at the immigration center, right? This your first day out on Leda?"

"First hour," I agreed, nodding. That made my head hurt again, and I touched

the bad spot.

Joe brought out a large old handkerchief. "Let me mop that. It's not as bad as

it feels. It's mostly a bruise with a little cut skin, and the blood's matting

the hair a little. You'll get off with a headache." He patted the spot, and

his reassurance made me feel better. "Look, Hope-I don't like to make you feel

worse, but the fact is, this whole system isn't much better than the mugging

you just got. At your age you just can't find decent work. All the employment

offices will tell you the same. You've got to get a ticket to the Jupiter

atmosphere-"

"They're not admitting aliens now," I said. "I have to find work out here in

the Ecliptic until I qualify for citizenship." The Jupiter Ecliptic is the

plane of the orbits of the satellites of Jupiter; actually, the outer moons do

not match the plane of the inner ones, but it's all called the Jupiter

Ecliptic anyway, or Juclip for short.

"Then you're screwed," he said, employing Saxon vernacular that was new to me.

"Your age and nationality box you in. And now that you've lost your cash stake

and your ID-"

"I must get them to issue me a new card," I said.

"Which will take weeks or months. I know this bureaucracy, Hope. What are you

going to eat while you're waiting?"

I spread my hands, baffled. I hadn't counted on getting mugged.

"Come on," he said. "I'm running short on time, but I can get you to the alien

office to put in for your card. Then-"

"Then?" I repeated, sounding stupid even to myself. I remained disorganized,

and my head was hurting.

He sighed. "Then I guess I'd better take you with me on the picking gig. It's

no life for the likes of you, but I can't see you stranded here. You'd wind up

having to mug for a living."

"Oh, I would never-" I protested, shocked at the notion.

"Kid, when you're hungry and broke, and there's no work, and you know if you

complain they'll deport you to your moon of origin, what do you do?"

I was silent. The realities of my situation were making themselves felt.

Without my card I couldn't get a good job, and without the hundred-dollar

tide-over stake they had issued me, I couldn't eat. They would indeed deport

me on the slightest pretext. My kind was tolerated, not welcomed, here. They

had made that clear enough at the outset. Mighty Jupiter, home of the free,

had little use for dusky-skinned foreigners who couldn't manage their money

and didn't work productively. Mighty Jupiter was not interested in listening

to excuses, such as being mugged or being underage for employment. It was

indeed a rigged system, but I was bound by its laws.

"Yes, I thought you were honest," Joe said. "I got a feel for people. That's

why I stopped to help you." He paused. "No, that's not entirely so. I would've

stopped, anyway. I can't pass up a working man in distress."

"No, you can't," I agreed.

His lips quirked. "You can tell?"

"Yes. It's my talent, too. Understanding people. I will go with you."

He laughed. " 'Sokay, Hope! But remember I warned you: Picking's tough work.

This is just to tide you through till your card comes and you can go for a

decent job."

"Yes, thanks."

We checked in at the alien registration office where the bored clerk made a

note. I would have to check in at weekly intervals, no oftener, until my

replacement card was issued. Meanwhile I was on my own.

We walked the concourse again. I call it walking, though actually it was more

like floating. Leda is the smallest outer moon of Jupiter, only about five

kilometers in diameter, so it's strictly trace-gravity on the surface. Leda is

really no larger than a major city-bubble, but of course it's solid instead of

hollow, so must have a hundred times the mass. It serves mainly as an anchor

for a series of rotating domes, each dome generating Earth-normal gravity by

its spin, at the edge. Traveling between domes tends to be stomach-wrenching

until you get used to it. Maybe that was part of my problem. Certainly I did

not feel well, and so I suffered myself to be moved along by this well-meaning

stranger.

This was, I think, the true beginning of my military career, which is why I

commence my narrative at this point. But the progression was not clear at the

time. That often seems to be the way with fate: We perceive its devious

channels only in retrospect.

At any rate, Joe brought me to the bus. This was an old space shuttle with its

guts gutted. It had been fitted with tiered bunks in the center of its

cylindrical shell. Thus a ship designed for perhaps thirty passengers could

house a hundred and twenty. There were a number of men hunched about the

bunks, and one somewhat more solid, self-assured man near the entrance.

"This is Gallows," Joe told me, bringing me to the solid man. "He's hard but

he's fair." He turned to the man. "This is Hope. He's not a regular picker; he

got rolled, so he needs some time."

"How's he going to pay his fare?" Gallows asked.

"I'll cover it," Joe said. "I've got a little to spare."

"It costs money?" I asked, startled. "I don't have-I can't-"

"There ain't no free lunch, kid," Gallows pronounced.

"I said I'd cover," Joe said, producing some bills.

Gallows accepted them. "Better teach him the ropes, too, Joe, if you don't

want to be stuck." He checked his list. "Bunk forty-nine."

"I'll repay-" I said, embarrassed. "I didn't realize-"

"Here's the bunk," Joe said, indicating the one marked 49. "We'll have to

split-shift it. You sleep four hours, I'll sleep four. I couldn't afford two

bunks. It'll work out."

"Yes, certainly," I agreed. "I'm sorry you had to pay anything for me. I'll

try to make it good as soon as-"

"I know you will, Hope," he said easily. "I told you, I have a feel for

people. I know what it's like to be in trouble."

"Trouble!" a man exclaimed a few bunks down the line. "Kid, if you like

trouble, Joe's your man!"

"That's Old Man Rivers," Joe said. "Him and me, we see eye to eye on-"

"Nothing!" Rivers agreed jovially. "Kid, you better know right now you hooked

up with the biggest rabble-rouser in the Juclip! Watch he doesn't incite a

riot with your head in the middle!"

"You two are friends?" I asked, perplexed, for I perceived that there was an

edge to this banter. I also had a moment's hesitation about the word Juclip; I

have defined it here, but this was my introduction to it.

Joe laughed. "Friends? Never! But what Rivers says is true. I'm a union

organizer. That's why they gave me my song."

"Your song?" Was this more slang?

"You asked for it." Joe sat on the bunk, hooking his heels under it so as not

to drift away in the trace gravity, and sang. His voice was decent but hardly

trained:

I dreamed I saw Joe Hill last night, alive as you and I. "But Joe," says I,

"You're ten years dead!" Says Joe, "I didn't die!"

And now the others in the ship joined in: "Says Joe, 'I didn't die!' "

It was a rousing song with a catchy tune, and the men sang it with gusto. But

I didn't understand it. "A dead union organizer?" I asked.

"Several centuries ago," Joe said. "But it's a good name."

"Do the others have songs, too?" This was another aspect of the culture I had

not known about. I had always been one of the most fluent students in my

English class, and I could speak the language almost faultlessly; now I

realized that there is a great deal more to understanding than fluency.

"All of them. That's what safeguards a man's place. His song."

"He just chooses any song he likes?"

Joe laughed again. He was really at ease here. "Never! It has to be given to

him by the group. Since this is your first trip, Hope, we'll figure out yours

on the way."

"But I hardly know any English songs!"

"You'll learn this one. We'll work it out, never fear."

"But suppose I don't like it?"

"Tough stuff," he said with a smile. "Your song is you." There was a murmur of

assent by the others.

I shrugged. It wasn't a vital matter. My head hurt, and I just wanted to rest.

I lay on the bunk, secured by its restraining strap, as the ship gradually

filled up. Most of the workers seemed to know each other at least casually;

they had been out on similar jobs before. The atmosphere was one of

familiarity rather than festivity.

"Hey, I hain't seen you before!" a man said to me.

"I'm new," I admitted.

"Then you have to be initiated!" he exclaimed, grinning in a not entirely

friendly manner. "You know what we do to-"

I saw his gaze go to Joe Hill, who had come up beside me. Joe had drawn a

monstrous dagger and was using it to carve his dirty fingernails back.

"He's with you?" the man asked Joe.

"Uh-huh. He got mugged and needed help, so I thought we'd help him. It's the

neighborly thing."

The man's eyes flicked to the dagger, and away. "Uh, yeah, sure. We'll help

him. But he's got to-"

"Have his song," Joe finished, making a small, significant gesture with the

blade.

"Just what I was going to say!" the man agreed. "We've got to tag him with a

song."

"Once we get moving," Joe said, putting away his knife.

"Right." And the man moved on to his assigned bunk.

I realized that Joe was an excellent friend to have while I was among

strangers. He might have a soft heart for a person in trouble, but that was

only one facet of his character. He had not been fooling with that dagger! I

owed him another favor.

I must have slept, because suddenly the ship was moving, accelerating from its

dock. My head still hurt; the vertigo of initial motion didn't help. I lay on

my back and listened.

They sang songs. Each man really did have his song, and he sang it with

assurance, though few people had good voices. That didn't seem to matter;

enthusiasm was what counted, and the assertion of possession. No one

interrupted when a man started his song; then, after a few bars, they joined

in, following his lead. The songs were unfamiliar to me, but I knew I would

pick them up readily enough. I was, perforce, now a member of this culture; I

would adapt.

Then, abruptly, it was my turn. "This is Hope's maiden voyage," Joe said. "We

must select his song." He turned to me. "First we have to know about you. How

did you come to leave Callisto?"

"That's a long story," I said. "You probably wouldn't be interested in-"

"We love long stories," Joe said. "They fill our tired evenings when the songs

give out. But right now we're only doing your song, not your story. Can you

summarize your life in one hundred words?"

"I can try," I said, realizing that this was not a joke. Now that I was

active, my headache was fading. "My family had trouble with a scion, and we

had to flee the planet in a bootleg bubble powered mostly by a gravity shield.

Pirates came and-" Suddenly the horrible memories overwhelmed me, I choked up

and could not continue. Only four months ago my family had been united and

reasonably happy. Now . . .

"I think I understand," Joe said. "They killed your family?"

I nodded.

"And you alone survive?"

"My-my sisters-" I said.

"Survive? Raped and taken as concubines for private ships?"

"One. The other, younger, she's called Spirit, and she's twelve. Got a ... a

position on a ship, concealed as a boy-"

"And you don't know where she is now," Joe finished. He looked around at the

bunks. "I think we have enough of the picture. You Hispanic refugees come

through a hardball game."

There was a general murmur of agreement. "A kid sister hiding among pirates,"

Rivers said. "He's got reason to worry."

"But his name is Hope," Gallows said. He was the foreman, but he was evidently

also part of this group.

"Hope is a worried man," Rivers said, looking around.

Slowly the others nodded.

I looked up, perplexed. "What?"

"Oh, that's right," Joe said, as if surprised. "You don't know our songs.

We'll have to teach you. Anybody want to do this one?"

"I'll do it," Rivers said. He turned to me. "With your permission, Hope, I

will sing your song."

"Sure," I said doubtfully.

"This time only, I lead Hope's song," Rivers said formally. "The Worried Man

Blues." And then he sang, in his fine deep voice:

It takes a worried man to sing a worried song It takes a worried man to sing a

worried song It takes a worried man to sing a worried song I'm worried now,

but I won't be worried long.

I had to smile. The words did speak to my mood and my situation, and it was a

pretty melody. Because the lines repeated, it was easy to remember.

"Now you try it," Rivers said.

Singing was not my forte, but I knew my voice was as good as those of a number

of the other folk I had heard here, and I realized this performance was

necessary if I was to be accepted into this group. I took a breath and sang,

somewhat tremulously. "It takes a worried man to sing a worried song-"

At the second line, the others joined in, and it became much easier. They were

careful not to drown me out; it was necessary that I be heard, that I set the

cadence. By the time we got to the fourth line, it was rousing, and I felt it

uplifting me. I really did feel better, physically and emotionally. I was part

of the group, participating in a performing art. Surely this rendition would

never be recorded as great music, but it was great, nevertheless.

Then Rivers sang the second verse-or maybe it was the first, for what we had

sung before turned out to be the refrain, repeated after every regular verse.

I went across the river and I lay down to sleep. . . . When I awoke, there

were shackles on my feet.

I had gone across the Jupiter Ecliptic-and lost my joy of life along with most

of my family and freedom. I was shackled, yes.

Twenty-nine links of chain around my leg . . . On every link, an initial of my

name.

Twenty-nine initials. I pondered that and realized that my name was legion. My

initials were H. H., but there were many others like me, and their initials

were on the chain, too. I liked the symbolism, painful as it was. Perhaps my

father's initials were there, M. H., and my mother's, C. H., and my two

sisters, F. H. and S. H., and my lost love, H. H., Helse Hubris, for I had

married her, almost. I liked that idea.

I asked the judge what might be my fine. . . . Twenty-one years on the

migrant-labor line!

That was, I learned later, adapted to the present situation; historically,

back on Planet Earth, where all these songs had originated, it had been the

Rocky Mountain Line. That was a mountain range in Earth's North America, said

to be fairly formidable; presumably the line- which would then have been a

locomotive or railroad line in which cumbersome steam-driven vehicles were

propelled along metal rails laid on the ground-required hand labor for its

initial establishment. I daresay it would have required a great deal of work

to lay those rails properly in a mountain district, as the locomotives needed

to operate on fairly level terrain. The technology of ancient times has always

intrigued me. So the migrant laborers must have had back-straining work-as I

would surely find out.

Anyway, I now had my song and my culture-nickname; I would have to answer to

either Hope or Worry. They were much the same, really; opposite faces of the

coin, depending on whether anticipation was positive or negative. I did like

the song, and especially I liked the belongingness it made me experience.

Singing together-there is something special about it. I believe every

experience in life, of any nature, has some value to a person; this one had a

great deal of value to me. Deprived of my family and my culture, I desperately

needed new ones, and now it seemed I had them. Not as good as the old ones,

but much, much better than drifting alone.

The songs continued as each man had his turn presenting his own, staking out

his position in the group. But I was tired and hurting, as the exhilaration of

my own song faded, and I lay on the bunk and listened and then slept. I

suspected I was taking Joe's turn on the bunk, but he didn't say anything.

I woke with a start as the gravity abruptly cut off; acceleration was over.

But Joe's hand was on me, holding me to the bunk, so I didn't float away. I

had forgotten to strap myself down this time, since the acceleration had

provided weight. Now he was putting the strap across. "Finish your nap," he

advised me.

"But it's your bunk, too," I protested groggily.

"Not to worry, Worry," he said with a smile. "I can sleep floating while we're

coasting."

"But when deceleration starts-"

"Kid, it's a fifteen-hour trip. I won't sleep that long. You're the one with

the hurting head; relax."

I followed his advice. I had been in free-fall before and could handle it. In

fact, I think the free-fall helped, for it relieved my body of the ordinary

strain of gravity, allowing it to concentrate on healing. Free-fall does not

help all people, but it helped me. When I woke again, several hours later, my

head was virtually clear.

Joe was sleeping in air, one hand gripping a bunk rail. He looked perfectly

comfortable.

Now the waking workers were swapping yarns and playing poker for pennies. I

was satisfied just to listen, familiarizing myself with their qualities. These

were generally uneducated folk, illiterate or partially literate, but canny

enough in their limited fashion. Literacy does not equate to intelligence or

humanity, after all. I was not familiar with their game of poker, but figured

I could learn it in due course.

Meanwhile, as a mental exercise, I calculated, in the unfamiliar Jupiter units

of miles, the location of the agricultural bubble we were traveling to. I had

been raised on the superior metric system, but I knew I would have to become

conversant with the system of the Colossus if I wanted to convert my alien

residency to proper citizenship. Also, my lost love Helse had used the Jupiter

system of measurements, so I felt closer to her with them, foolish as this may

seem.

Acceleration measured in this fashion came to 32 feet per second squared, for

one gee. 3,600 seconds in an hour meant-this was pretty good mental exercise,

because of the irregular intervals between units-about 115,000 feet per second

in an hour of gee, which seemed to be what we had experienced. There were-I

strained to remember -5,280 feet in a mile. That meant we were traveling about

22 miles per second now, or close to 80,000 miles per hour. Fifteen hours at

that velocity would be about 1,200,000 miles. But we would not be traveling

straight in toward Jupiter; we would angle back to intercept the bubble as it

overhauled Leda in its smaller, faster orbit. The bubble was probably about

ten million kilometers out from Jupiter, compared to Leda's eleven million-

oops, I had slipped back into the metric system!

At any rate, I was satisfied that the bubble was about 90 percent of Leda's

distance out, in this miniature Solar System that was the Juclip, and that we

would not be carried far from Leda in the ten days Joe said we would be

picking. That reassured me; I didn't want to get lost and not be on hand to

recover my identification.

We did indeed arrive on schedule, decelerating at gee for an hour and docking

on the bubble. Our ship simply hooked onto a rack awaiting it and hung nose-

out, suddenly upside down as the gee resumed. The bunks were made to take it;

they could be used from either side. The bubble was rotating one complete turn

every minute and a half, so that centrifugal force brought our weight at its

surface to almost gee, Earth-normal gravity.

We climbed the ladder-tube up into the bubble. Inside, we stepped out of the

lock onto the great, curving inner surface. I stood, dazzled by it.

The bubble was a virtually hollow sphere about a thousand feet in diameter.

From a mirror in its center shone the sun; or rather, the twenty-sevenfold

magnified image of the sun, projecting the hellish intensity of Earth-normal

solar radiation to the broad, curved expanse of green plants. I knew I would

not be able to tolerate that very long; the radiation would soon blister my

skin.

The bubble was, of course, oriented so that its pole pointed to the sun.

Otherwise the light would have been flashing on and off in sub-two-minute

cycles, not good for the plants. This way, the bubble's rotation was

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摘要：

TheauthorwishestothankFirstLieutenantJimParkerforvaluableadviceoncertainmilitaryaspectsofthisnovel,notablythenatureanduseofthepugilsticksandtheorganizationofaunit;andZaneSteinandJacobSchwartzforassistanceconcerningtheplanetoidChiron.ContentsEditorialPreface1.WORRIEDMANBLUES2.BASICTRAINING3.FIVESTEEL...

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Anthony, Piers - Bio of a Space Tyrant 02 - Mercenary

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