Free Hero! by Dave Duncan

about. A girl didn’t ask a boy how old he was before she bedded him. Lots had spread their knees for their great-grandfathers, and not always by mistake, either.
    But apparently his statement had been true, for Zozo was nodding. “Some people just go sooner, Admiral. The body starts resisting the drugs. You know that! The Lord grants some of us one century; others He honors with two. Blessed is the Lord!” Her voice sounded sincere, but her sagging face was bitter. “Sooner or later the Lord sends for all of us, and for Tham it was sooner.”
    “Two years?” Vaun knew the chill that death gave off when it was very close. He knew he could face it without wetting his pants, but he didn’t know if he could control his bladder that way for two years. Yet Tham had never as much as dropped a hint.
    Of course, if Vaun did have a weakness, it was picking up hints.
    Zozo was driving away the silence with nervous words. “When the dosage becomes too high, there’s a sudden rejection. A catastrophic rejection. It happened a week ago.”
    “But you? That can’t be coincidence.”
    She looked down so he could not see her eyes. “We’ve been together a long time. We’re going to go together.”
    He wondered if Tham knew of her decision, and what their precious church said about suicide. He also felt unusually lost. Absurdly, he was mostly aware that his knee was throbbing painfully, and he was enormously weary and hungry, as well as disappointed that his long journey probably wasn’t going to do him any good.
    It was morning now and he hadn’t had his booster.
    “I understand,” he said. “I admire you for that, Zozo.”
    Two outright lies back to back, but she gave him a hard stare, and then said, “Thank you, Vaun.” She looked comforted, as if anyone would believe words spoken in such circumstances. “I probably didn’t have a great deal of time left myself, as I seem to be going fairly quickly. You miss it horribly at first. Every hour it shows more. I feel so tired…”
    He could never remember hearing her complain before, ever. He would have expected more heroics from Zozo. When she ran out of convenient, empty words, he said, “What sort of shape is he in?”
    “Tham? Hellish!” A trace of the old strength emerged briefly from the ruins as she became protective. “You don’t want to see, and he doesn’t want you to see. Withdrawal is everyone’s right, Vaun. A boy wants his friends to remember him the way he was. A girl certainly does, and you had no damn business bursting in here like this.”
    Business…he forced his mind back to business, and why he had come. If Tham had been failing for two years, then Vaun’s suspicions were unfounded. The ComCom’s withdrawal at this time was just a horrible, ironic coincidence. But the rest of the world had a right to life.
    “I need to talk to Tham, Zozo. There’s a Q ship on impact trajectory. It’s not just him and you that are going to die. It’s everyone. The whole planet.”
    He saw the suspicion leap up again in her eyes. She remembered her gun, and raised it slightly.
    “Why did you think that Roker had sent me?” he demanded sharply. And why the insane missile defenses, if they were real and not just a bluff?
    The folds of skin tightened around her eyes. “It’s Tham. He’s having…not delusions…but he has a crazy notion that Roker may come here to get him.”
    Get him? Why would anyone go after a dying boy? Then Vaun understood, even as Zozo put it into words.
    “He says Roker’s threatening to do a mind bleed on him.”
    E VEN AT DOGGOTH, Vaun has rarely ever seen a human medic before, but this one is undoubtedly human—unusually dark skin, but quite human. Her snowy-white coat bulges over hip and breast. The whites of her eyes are tinged with yellow, her head and hands coal black. So is her thick, woolly hair. Recalling anthropology classes, he decides she must be an almost-pure example of one of the rarer Elgith stocks. He supposes