Hero Read online

  Hero

  Joel Rosenberg

  For Eleanor Wood, one of my heroes

  This is a work of fiction. All the characters and events portrayed in this book are fictional, and any resemblance to real people or incidents is purely coincidental.

  Copyright © 1990 by Joel Rosenberg

  All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book or portions thereof in any form.

  Baen Publishing Enterprises

  P.O. Box 1403

  Riverdale, NY 10471

  www.baen.com

  eISBN: 978-1-61824-861-9

  Acknowledgments

  I'm grateful for the comments and other help I've gotten:

  —from my de jure copyeditor and de facto editor, Mark J. McGarry, who, thankfully, hasn't mellowed with age;

  —from my de jure and also de facto editor, John Silbersack;

  —from the other members of the workshop: Bruce Bethke and Peg Kerr Ihinger;

  —from David Dyer-Bennet, Beth Friedman and, particularly, Harry F. Leonard (2LT, Connecticut National Guard, Ret.), who helped with the glossary;

  —and for the additional help I've gotten from Mickey Zucker Reichert, M.D., and, of course, Felicia.

  Metzada, noun—

  1. [Archaic] An ancient rock fortress in the Palestine satrapy of Great Persia, about twenty kilometers south of En Gedi. Scene, circa 72-73 A.D., of the final stand of the Jewish zealots against Rome; the defenders killed themselves rather than surrender.

  2. The second planet of Epsilon Indi, inhabited primarily by descendants of Jewish refugees from the state of Israel and the North American Federation. Metzada's only significant commercial export is the sale of the services of the Metzadan Mercenary Corps.

  3. [Colloq.] The Metzadan Mercenary Corps.

  Nueva Terra, noun—

  1. The third planet of Tau Ceti, inhabited primarily by descendants of colonists from La France, Deutschland, Greater Britain, Italia and Afrika Del Sud.

  2. [Colloq.] Any particularly earthlike planet upon which unmodified terran flora and fauna can readily flourish, (e.g., "Dean's World is a real nueva terra.")

  PART ONE

  AMBUSH

  CHAPTER 1

  Spare Parts

  He was a spare part, newly machined and shoved into a place where he didn't quite fit, where he never would fit.

  The cargo bay stank of plastics and oil and sweat and his own fear. Ari Hanavi tried to keep his trembling under control as the skipshuttle took another lurch. Gripping the arms of the acceleration frame helped, but only a little. He shifted a centimeter or so to his left, as though huddling up against the smoothly curving wall could offer some protection.

  It couldn't. Not to him, and not to more than seven hundred other men crammed into two decks in the cargo bay of the skipshuttle, packed tightly into rows of acceleration frames divided by the same kind of steel that divided the lower deck from the upper, all divided from the screaming air outside by only a few thin layers of titanium aluminide.

  Ari couldn't stop thinking about how thin those layers were.

  Beyond Benyamin's acc frame, Yitzhak Slepak grumbled something. Ari didn't pay him much attention, although, packed in as tightly as they were, he probably could have made out his words despite the noise. Slepak was only a couple of thousand hours older than Ari, but he tried to act like it was years. He was always grumbling about something, probably trying to sound like a man instead of a virgin.

  Some of the men complained a lot. It helped, they said.

  It wouldn't have helped Ari any. All it would have done was remind Benyamin and the other three that he wasn't experienced. He wasn't even a PFC. He was just a very green private, a seventeen-year-old virgin, and he didn't fit in, he'd never fit.

  There was something that the rest of them didn't know, not yet: Ari Hanavi was a coward.

  If they knew, everybody he loved would turn against him.

  No, not if. When they knew. . . .

  His brothers, both of his mothers, the Sergeant, even Miriam. If they found out. When they found out.

  But maybe not yet. Please, not yet.

  The whine of the outside air got louder, now easily loud enough to drown out casual conversation. Ari tried to force himself to relax.

  The Nueva Terra job was just going to be cadre, he told himself, the regiment configured for training, the platoon Ari was a very junior member of acting as a mainly token security element. It was likely he would spend most of his time standing guard duty at a Casalingpaesan training facility a thousand klicks from the war zone while the regiment turned Casa virgins into soldiers.

  At best, he would have some time off on a new world while the senior staff took the trained and tuned Casa division into the field. At worst, the RHQ security platoon would accompany Division HQ into the field, and perhaps Ari would have to help his brother debrief a returning Casalingpaesan patrol or two. More likely, he would just help teach some Casalinguese to do it.

  Easiest thing in the world. No courage needed, no warrior's reflex required.

  Please.

  Benyamin muttered something; Ari couldn't quite make it out. Ari's fingers were groping at the air under his chin where his mike should have been before he remembered that he wasn't wearing his headset. The captain of the skipshuttle didn't want any RF interference—much less the seemingly random spurts of packed and coded packets—from inside the skip-shuttle: all their comm gear was stowed away in their chestpacks.

  "Say again?"

  "Relax," Benyamin said. "It'll be okay."

  That was what his big brother was always saying, and when he wasn't saying it, he was making it so.

  It wasn't just that Benyamin was fifteen years older than Ari, although that made a difference. It wasn't just his size: Benyamin was actually a centimeter shorter than Ari's 176 and only a bit thicker, massing about ninety-five kilograms to Ari's eighty-five—but Ari always thought of him as a giant of a man, even when he stood next to Dov.

  Benyamin wasn't just his big brother, he was the big brother, forty days older than Kiyoshi had been. They all said that Ari looked like a younger version of Benyamin, but that was nonsense. There was a lot of nonsense that was passed around the family. Like the way that the other boys called Ari "the General," as if he'd be an officer some day.

  It was all stupid. Ari didn't look anything like his big brother. Benyamin's jaw was firm, his head covered with tight curls of brown hair, his gaze level and even. Ari shook all the time. While Ari couldn't even move the tight grimace that his face had become, the smile that covered Benyamin's pleasantly ugly face was warm, even in the harsh green light of the overhead glows.

  As Tetsuo always said, Benyamin's smile didn't have anything to do with "an emotion; that smile was a report. It said: I'll handle it, I'll take care of it. I've got it all under control, don't worry for a moment.

  How can you take care of your little brother being a gutless coward?

  There was no way out.

  Ari shifted fractionally in his acc frame, held there more by the straps than by what little weight there was. He couldn't do more than twitch: there was no real back to what would have been a couch or chair in a civvy skipshuttle. What would have been the frame for a seat cushion was built differently, to hold his loosened buttpack; another steel frame, replacing the back of the seat, supported his backpack.

  All of them were like that, held into their little niches like a set of specialized tools in a preformed case. Which was, in a sense, what they were.

  Lots of them were spare parts, sometimes new, sometimes cannibalized from other units. Benyamin, Alon, Laskov, Lavon, Lavinsky had all been in the old Fifth Regiment, under Becker. The regiment had been cut to pieces on Kinshasakisasa, then cut to pieces after Kinshasakisasa, i
ts colors retired, the survivors shuffled into other sections, platoons, companies, battalions and regiments.

  The skipshuttle screamed as they descended, 750 men and virgins packed into a crowded, smelly space that would have been tight for half that many.

  Some were taking the ride a lot more casually than Ari was; the soldier in the acc frame directly above him was patiently drumming his bootheels against the footrests. By the TO, it should have been Pinhas Gevat, Kelev One Two Four Five, Ari's equivalent in Section Two and one of the other five Kelev virgins—but half the time you didn't get the right spot. Ari's fireteam had been split up; he and Benyamin were two rows away from Laskov, Lavon and Lavinsky.

  He pumped first his right leg, then his left, trying to keep from getting cramps. Ari had good Metzadan circulation, but his blood tended to pool in his chest and head in zero gee. Like the low-gee acne speckling his face, the cramps were a common complaint. He had learned in school and in training that both would go away after he was down—the cramps within a day or two; the acne within a week or so.

  He rubbed at his face. Nothing to be done about the acne. A brisk sprint on a running ring would prevent the cramps—that was what he had done on the troopship—but there wasn't room in the skipshuttle even to swing a knife.

  His rifle was clamped across his lap, holding it and him in place. His hands fell to the clamps, fingers resting lightly on the cold aluminum. It would only take two quick pulls to release it, and he had never liked being held down. Back when he was a boy, wrestling with his brothers, that had been the way they could always make him furious: just pin him down and hold him. If he didn't concentrate he would panic, he would lose control and—

  No. Stop it. He forced himself to breathe slower, to at least simulate relaxing. There was nowhere to go. What could he do? Rattle around between Benyamin and the wall, or bounce up and down between his acc frame and the one above him?

  His right hand, as though of its own volition, came up to his backpack's release, right over the sternum, just under the swell of his chestpack, while his left fell to the release of his buttpack. Two quick pulls and he would be free.

  It would be good to be free.

  Benyamin caught the movement and his smile broadened. "Really," he shouted over the almost deafening roar. "Everything will be fine."

  He was right, of course. If anything went wrong, there was nothing they could do. Which was why they were all clamped in tight and were supposed to just sit still. It only stood to reason.

  If only his palms would listen to reason; the grips of his acc frame were sweat-slick.

  "Hey, come on." Benyamin smiled. "Would you rather be here in the first shuttle, or waiting up in zero gee with the other two loads?"

  Ari shrugged. He really didn't mind zero gee.

  "Relax," Benyamin, said. "If something were to happen," he shouted, "at, say, Mach 5—I said, if we take a glancing hit from some local artillery—we'd be dead, spread over the sky, before we even felt it."

  That was supposed to reassure Ari. Benyamin was like that. Ari had more than a sneaking suspicion that despite Ari's supposedly better training, Benyamin's six campaigns had taught him that the possibility of sudden death was reassuring. Or maybe it was the series of four puckered scars that ran from his fused right wrist and up that arm, almost to the elbow. Benyamin had never told him how he got those. The only thing he would say was that there was nothing that Ari could learn from it because not being a damn fool is something you had to learn for yourself. He—

  The lights went out.

  A few rows behind him somebody screamed, and the scream became a chorus of hoarse shouts.

  Ari Hanavi clamped his hands around the stock of his Barak assault rifle, shut his eyes tightly and waited to die.

  "Tel Aviv Ten. Ease up, all of you." Colonel Peled's crisp, cold voice, broadcast over the wall speaker high above Ari's head, cut through the shouts and the cries. "It's just the fucking lights."

  Even in cadre regiments, Metzada generally tries to get the most out of its senior field grade officers, and Shimon Bar-El worked that tradition hard: Peled was the regimental chief of staff and deputy commander, mainly responsible for running the company-sized Support/Transport/Medical Command. He had been with Uncle Shimon even longer than Galil had, although not as long as Dov and Avram.

  Nobody had been with Shimon as long as Dov and Avram.

  "There's no need to be loud, Mordecai." Shimon Bar-El's voice was dry and distant over the speakers, its lazy calmness reassuring. "After all, there were no shouts just now. I am not going to believe that Metzadan soldiers are afraid of the dark. And the Casas aren't paying us for screams," he said.

  "Not ours," Captain Yitzhak Galil said with a boyish laugh. "Shit, if I got paid for every time I screamed, I'd have retired ten years ago."

  "Fifteen-year-olds don't retire," Bar-El said.

  The other two laughed, joining in on the weak joke. The general, his chief of staff and the commander of the regimental HQ company were a well-polished comedy act, and their routines had been refined by frequent use. Or overuse.

  The noisy whine of the outside air intensified even further as their weight started to press them down.

  The lights flickered on for a moment, then dimmed.

  "Just what we need," Benyamin said. "A funny RHQ company commander."

  In front of Ari, Tzvi Hirshfield leaned his head back against the mesh to talk to Benyamin. "Hey, remember the time on Rand? Back when he'd just made sergeant in the Fifth?"

  "With the jecty and the goat? Yeah. Asshole."

  Hirshfield shrugged. "Well, I thought it was funny."

  "You would."

  The lights went out again, then came back on. This time there were no shouts, only the scream of the air outside.

  Ari leaned toward Benyamin. "I thought you said Galil's good."

  "When there're shots going off, he's supposed to be pretty good." His brother shrugged. "But I can get real tired of this shit in garrison."

  Which is where they were going to be for the foreseeable future. Cadre work is, by definition and in practice, garrison work.

  "Now, martinets aren't too bad," Benyamin went on, warming to the subject. "I can take a martinet; they're predictable and—"

  "You can take a martinet? Bullshit." Hirshfield grunted. "Tell that to Simchoni."

  "Simchoni? A bit strict, maybe, but I wouldn't call him a martinet."

  "Not Ezra. Sol."

  "That shithead." Benyamin scowled, then shrugged. "Rest in peace."

  A passenger skipshuttle would have had an accelerometer mounted high on the forward bulkhead for the convenience and relief of passengers, so they could see that their weight was only returning, not growing and growing. . . .

  Watching the accelerometer was supposed to control the sense of panic you get when your stomach tells you that you're getting more weight than you're supposed to. Then again, a passenger skipshuttle probably wouldn't have hit even two gees for a Nueva Terra landing. Ari was sure they were hitting four—better than three times the grav on Metzada. Like having three of his brothers sitting on his shoulders and chest.

  Benyamin's chuckle sounded forced as the lights flickered and then came back on, while their weight began to ease. "Told you it was nothing," he said.

  Beyond him, Yitzhak Slepak grunted. "Wonder if that was the pilot having a bit of fun with us," he said. "I might look him up later."

  "Shut up," Benyamin said, strangely without heat.

  If Ari had mouthed off like that, Benyamin would have been jumping up and down on him, perhaps literally, but ever since the regiment had boarded the skipshuttle on Rand, he had noticed that the men treated Yitzhak and a few other boys more gently than most of the virgins.

  Didn't make any sense, but Ari didn't ask about it and they didn't talk about it. One of the first things they taught you was that you'd usually be told what you need to know, and when you needed to know it. Questions weren't really discouraged—but they ha
d better be pertinent.

  Benyamin bit his lip, considering, as the roar of the skipshuttle started to lessen. "Final approach; the grav feels about right."

  "You sure?"

  Benyamin didn't smile. "No. I don't have that kind of feel. Dov would know. Want me to get up and ask him?"

  Ari didn't answer. Dov Ginsberg frightened him, a lot, and he was sure he had only heard some of the stories.

  "Tel Aviv Ten. We are three minutes from touchdown." Peled's voice, businesslike as always, came over the speaker. Peled couldn't talk over a comm system without coming down hard on at least one word every sentence; Ari could never quite figure which word it would be. "Estimate of fifteen minutes rollout and cooldown before they unlock us—and for those of you who have forgotten, that means the heat shields will still be hot. You section leaders will keep your people the hell away from the skin. Support/ Transport Command will deploy administrative, repeat administrative—and keep cool, people. In case anybody's memory is slipping or their fingers are getting itchy, this is not, repeat not, a hot LZ, and we will not have any accidents."

  "Exactly right." Uncle Shimon's voice came on in quiet counterpoint. "Headquarters is administrative; all of Regimental HQ Company is operational—not just Kelev."

  Ari didn't understand the reason for that, although he didn't mind. It meant that the headquarters security force, call sign Kelev, would get priority for getting off the bus to Camp Ramorino and would be the last ones on.

  "Additionally," Shimon went on, "Heavy Weapons Troop Training Detachment and Sapper TTD deploy operational."

  "Tel Aviv Ten." Peled, again, "That means that Nablus and Deir Yasin will monitor the RHQ company freak. What was that? Hang on. Louder, Meir; I can't hear you."

  There was a pause.