The Hero Function

The Hero Function

by Andrew K Lawston

Captain Sharp Johnson stirred as a shower of sparks spattered against the floor an inch to the left of his nose. With a tired groan, he grabbed the base of his chair and hauled himself upright to survey the wreckage.

His ship was falling apart before his eyes. All over the bridge, instrument panels were popping open with dry cracks. The security station was the worst, a steady beat of sharp snaps as the delicate memory crystals were exposed to the atmospheric currents in the room and vaporised.

The few areas not taken up by instruments and displays were covered in rubble. The upper hull had buckled under the first impact and most of the deck immediately above the bridge had just collapsed.

Thank God he’d seen the Signs, Sharp reflected, and evacuated the crew minutes before the Raath fleet had emerged. Now, just as the mad prophetess had said, he alone would be the final victim of the Raath menace. Unless, and he smiled at the thought, he could find a way of destroying seven Raath cruisers even as his own ship hurtled through Sybellious VIII’s upper atmosphere.

Atmosphere? What if...

‘Oh, I wouldn’t bother.’

Sharp jumped four feet in the air at the sound of the voice (internal grav failing as well, then) and whirled to face the unexpected noise. Sitting on the wrecked security station was... well, a bloke in a cloak. Something about the guy was just blurry, and Sharp wasn’t even sure what colour the cloak was. He was glad his latest mission had involved so many hallucinations, or he might have panicked.

As it was, Sharp asked drily. ‘And who the hell are you supposed to be? Death or something?’

The figure coughed, and the sparks froze. ‘Nah, just think of me as a... well-wisher. I’ve got your best interests at heart, Sharp, and I don’t think this is a battle you want to win.’

Sharp glanced at the weapons array, with its single gorgeous ‘ready’ light. ‘What do you mean?’

‘Well,’ the bloke stretched, ‘Supposing there was a way for you to get off this ship and destroy that fleet before it reaches the Tiethoon system where we both know it’ll be wiped out anyway – what happens next?’

Sharp scratched his temple. ‘The crew are all safe, so I guess we’d wait for a new ship and –‘

He was interrupted by the bloke’s laughter. ‘Yeah, 18 months on you’ll be back on a brand new ship with your old crew and, who knows, maybe a few new faces. But, captain, how can you possibly go on from taking out an entire fleet single-handed with a single crippled spaceship?’

‘You think I should smear myself over Sybellious VIII?’

‘I’m saying you gave it your best shot and it’s all downhill from here either way.’

‘Screw you,’ Sharp snarled suddenly.

‘Fair enough, Squire,’ said the bloke and promptly vanished. Sparks began dancing in the air again.

Sharp forgot about the bloke as he used the damaged gravity to jump through the hole in the ceiling. He forgot about him as he burst into the torpedo bay, scanning frantically for the single intact missile he’d seen from the bridge.

Ignoring the tortured shriek of stressed metal all around him, Sharp evoked the memory of twenty year old engineering lectures as he prised open the torpedo and ripped out the warhead, the AI, the abort circuits and guidance systems.

When it was just a hollow tube with a rocket at the end, he clambered in, slammed the manual override with the heel of his boot and yanked the torpedo closed.

Sharp felt the biting cold even before the missile launched. Someone had had the great idea of making the casings transparent for diagnostic ease, so for a few moments he had an unrivalled view of the Epicure’s final planetfall, burning in a purple Sybellious morning, surrounded by Raath vessels taking occasional listless potshots to hasten its demise. With the Neutralm warhead removed, the torpedo should just show up as another piece of debris from the dying ship.

The captain junped as a Raath hull swung into his field of vision, although it was exactly as he’d expected. The tiny thrusters gave the missile one last kick of speed as Sharp made a final adjustment to the rudder with his boot.

On the Raath command deck, Admiral Shylar was becoming impatient. Johnson was a wild card among the humans, granted, and his dalliance with the Witches on Darkworld made him even more of a threat, but surely there was no need to delay a whole armada just to watch a doomed enemy burn?

Shylar leaped to his feet as an Earthforce torpedo burst through his viewscreen to land in the middle of his command deck. A security team charged in to assist, but all except one were sucked through the sparking hole in the wall before the emergency forcefield could be deployed.

The engineer was screaming. ‘I told you the deflectors would be weakened inside the gravity well!’ Shylar shot him in the throat without thinking.

The remaining bridge crew approached the smoking missile cautiously. They knew it contained no radioactive or mutagenic material, or the proximity alerts would have kicked in. But stories always circulated of the humans’ lingering fondness for old-fashioned chemical reactions.

All in all, it was something of an anti-climax when Sharp Johnson burst from the torpedo with a laser rifle in each hand and incinerated the command crew.

Sharp was sweating as he re-programmed the Raath weapons array. The damn lizards even controlled their computers through some arcane honour code and every frustrated expletive brought the captain a subroutine closer to being fingered as an intruder. One last chance, then, to spark the chain reaction...

‘I suppose you feel a lot better now.’

The bloke in the cloak was perched on the torpedo, gesturing grandly at the piles of dust and scorched claws that marked the end of the Raath flagship’s command crew. ‘I mean, you escaped the jaws of death by steering a missile with your bloody feet and nicked an enemy cruiser in the process! Nice work, Sharp.’

Sharp stared at the figure for a moment, struck by its bitterness. He noted that time appeared to have frozen again, and continued to send polite orders to the computer as he spoke.

‘What do you want of me?’

The bloke bowed his head, and raised a hand to his brow. His voice, when it came, was strained. ‘I want you to give up, Sharp. Just give up, while you’re still a hero.’

‘You want me dead?’

Page 2