THE QUEEN OF THE LEGION

Jack Williamson

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1

The legend of Jil Gyrel has an unlikely opening.

It finds her a lonely child.

A spindly little girl, big-eyed and generally grimed with red dust and mud, born in a shabby little town on a bare frontier world. She used to dream about the Legion, wishing she might grow up to be another of its storied heroes. But she was poor and isolated. Except for her old grandfather, nobody wanted her. She had no visible gifts, no visible promise of any great destiny.

True, fireballs had burned in the sky on the night she was born, but fireballs were common at Hawkshead Pass. Meteors rained out of the blazing nebular sky every winter night, and her mother hated them.

Nobody told her that she could ever grow up to write her name on the roll that men remember.

Yet she did.

Thanks to the nebula.

The Great Hawkshead Nebula on the star maps. It had been born when a small star cluster drifted into a larger galactic cloud. Gravity condensed gas and dust. New stars formed, some gigantic. The giant suns burned their mass, exploding into supernovas. A shockwave spread from the multiple explosions, searing the worlds of the older stars with nuclear fury.

A cosmic instant later, the dying shockwave met a faster-racing human explosion. Riding rockets and geodesic drives, men had spread far from old Terra. The shockwave checked them. Cooler by then, grown too thin to see, it was still a deadly barrier to any craft under non-Newtonian propulsion.

Checked, the human wave refused to stop. Starmen hungered too hard for the worlds within the nebula. Those old planets were empty now, burned clean by the shockwave, all their strange wonders waiting to be reclaimed. It was Commander Ben Gyrel, on the Legion Argo, who found the way through the barrier wave.

The Gyrel Channel, as men came to call it, marked by the three Beacon Suns. Alpha, safely outside the nebula. Beta, at the channel mouth. Gamma, the first star inside. Beta itself had opened the channel. A hot blue star, flung from the nebula’s exploding core by savage tidal forces, it had overtaken the dying wave to sweep a tunnel through it. Flying now at the wave’s forefront, Beta and its single far planet were still wrapped in the hazardous clouds of meteor drift they had gathered.

Most men dreaded the nebula, even while its riches and mysteries allured them. It swallowed Jil’s father. Her mother feared it and despised Hawkshead Pass. The Legion station there had been important once, but that cherished greatness had faded long before her birth.

The shining starships still went by, following the tachyonic flashers old Ben had set spinning to mark the channel, but most of them steered around Beta’s meteor swarms. The Pass had little left but memory, yet Jil’s childhood there began happily enough.

She loved the long winter nights, when she could see the nebula. Its splendid fire-wings burned green and scarlet beyond the black dust cloud that made the hook-beaked head. Even the meteor storms that terrified her mother were wild celebrations for her.

She used to stand outside until her mother screamed for her to come in, shivering in the frost and that blazing wonder. Sudden blades of white fire sliced the night, and bright explosions filled it with rumbling thunder. Sometimes rock fragments rattled down around her in a whiff of hot sulphur.

She felt born for the nebula, always somehow certain that it would be her destiny. All her life she had known the hardy people who ventured up the passage into its wonders and its perils. She felt proud of her name, because the Gyrels had been a Legion family. Some reckless prank had washed her grandfather out of the Legion Academy, but her father was a Legion pilot, and she was determined to follow when she could.

‘A space person?’ The notion shocked her mother. ‘Baby doll, you don’t know what the Legion is. You’d have to live with rough, foul-spoken men. You’d be a slave to silly regulations. You’d be taught to fight – to destroy your own innocent fellow beings. My darling baby doll, a butcher in the Legion!’

Her mother had her own plans for Jil.

‘You hurt me, baby doll.’ Worry pinched her made-up face. ‘You could be pretty. A proper little lady. If you would keep out of the mud and comb your hair and learn the civilized manners you’ll need when we get out of this horrid hole and back home to Terra.’

Jil didn’t mind the mud. She didn’t want to be a proper little lady. Most of all, she didn’t like being called baby doll. Her grandfather never minded whether she combed her hair, and he said she didn’t need civilized airs here on the star frontier.

Sometimes she found it hard to like her mother. Her grandfather was the one she loved. A thin, frail old man when she knew him, but very straight and spry. His eyes were blue and bright, with a crinkly smile always around them, and he had never been afraid of the nebula.

People called him Lucky Lyn. His luck had come from the Gyrel gift. That was a special sense of space and energy and mass and distance that the space medics had never entirely understood, though they called it a space-adaptive mutation. It made the Gyrel men master starpilots, able to perceive and avoid the hazards of the nebula, at least as long as they were lucky.

The gift had brought old Ben Gyrel up the channel into the nebula. Lyn was his son, born with the gift. It had led him to rich strikes on a dozen new planets while he was young, though he had lost the gift and most of his luck long before she was born.

She used to dream she might somehow inherit that rare talent and pilot a craft of her own up Gyrel channel, but her mother always told her that could never happen.

‘Don’t fool yourself, baby doll. Women can carry the mutant gene, but the gift itself is linked to sex. The medics say only males can display it.’ Her mother looked unhappy. ‘It broke your father’s heart when you weren’t born a boy.’

If her father ever really felt that way, he had forgiven her long ago. He was a lean, quiet man with a gentle voice and sad blue eyes that seemed to be always looking for far-off stars. He limped a little from some old accident he didn’t talk about. She never knew him really well, because he was nearly always gone on another endless voyage.

The commander of his ship was Captain Shon Macharn. The captain had no family, and he often came home with her father. He was stronger and taller, very straight, with shining Legion medals on his uniform. He liked to tell about the strange worlds where they had been. Sometimes he brought her little beads of fused metal and glass, relics of unknown creatures the shockwave had killed.

Fingering those odd beads, she wondered about those lost beings. Could they have been like men, perhaps as noble and brave as the old heroes of the Legion? Though the beads told her very little, a sense of tragedy haunted her. The wave must have been very dreadful, sweeping whole worlds and erasing everything.

Only the laser-diamonds had not been burned. Captain Macharn had told her about them before her father found one he brought back for her mother. It was a small black crystal, eight-sided like a natural diamond crystal, but different in every other way. The feel of it was queerly slick and cold, the color so black that it almost hurt her eyes. The laser light darted out of it in sudden stabbing arrows, red and green like the nebula itself.

Her father let her hold it in her hand, but he said he had to sell it because her mother needed the money. When Captain Macharn saw how much she wanted it, he paid her father for it and gave it to her to keep for her very own.

She loved him for the gift and for his deep rumbly laugh and because he loved her. After he and her father were gone back into the nebula, she kept the wonderful diamond in the bottom of the old space locker in her room, and one her grandfather had brought with him out to the nebula. Sometimes at night she took the diamond with her to bed, holding it in her hand and wondering about the mystery of it till she fell asleep.

‘Nobody knows,’ her grandfather said when she asked him what it was. ‘They’ve been found on a dozen planets deep inside the nebula. Somebody must have made them, back before the shockwave passed. Who? Why?’ He shrugged, looking far away. ‘We can’t even guess.’

‘I’ll find out,’ she promised him. ‘When I grow up.’

‘Perhaps you can.’ His eyes came back to study her. ‘The nebula has a lot of mysteries men have never solved.’

Even the laser flashes were something nobody could explain. Light was absorbed by that shining blackness, her grandfather said. Somehow it was stored and changed and flashed out again. When people split the diamonds, looking for the secret, all they got was graphite dust.

She used to hope her father and Captain Macharn might discover laser-makers still alive or, anyhow, learn how they had lived and died. Her grandfather thought they must have been in flight from the exploding stars in the core of the nebula when disaster overtook them, but he was afraid no evidence would ever be found.

The strange black diamonds were very hard to burn. That was why any were left. Slowly cooling, the shockwave had left air that men could breathe and such hardy plants as leatherweed on some of the outer planets, far enough from the nebula core, but nothing else alive.

Many of those burned worlds were still deadly traps, hot with killing radiation and wrapped in unknown danger, but they were all rich with precious heavy elements created in the supernovas. Her father’s job, and Captain Macharn’s, was to find those treasure planets and tame their dangers so humans could live there.

She loved her recollections of the times when they used to come home, nearly always together. Their space gear would have faint odors of the far worlds where they had been. Her father never talked much, but Captain Macharn would tell about their exciting flights and landings. Her mother would make good things to eat and open a bottle of bright-smelling Nebulon wine, and they were all happy together.

The captain and her father had been best friends since they first met at the Legion Academy, back on old Terra. They had known her mother there. Jil wondered once if her mother should have married the captain and kept him out of the nebula. Because she didn’t really like the Legion, or anybody in it, or even the people coming up the channel.

‘Scum of humanity,’ her mother called them. ‘Not one spark of culture in a shipload of them. Don’t you ever speak to them, baby doll, or let them speak to you.’

‘Be nice to your mother,’ her grandfather told her once, when Jil was feeling hurt and angry. ‘We must try to understand. The trouble is, she doesn’t belong. She was born too proud of her own people, and she’s never learned to love the Gyrel name.’

Her own people were the Ulnars. They claimed to be descended from the old space emperors, and her mother yearned for the time centuries ago when they had ruled Terra and all the other planets of Sol from their splendid Purple Hall.

Her name was really Tsara, but she had pronounced it Rara when she was small, and people still called her that. She was a slim little woman with a dimpled chin and bright yellow hair. Beautiful, Jil thought when she was happy. That wasn’t often.

‘Trapped herself.’ Lucky Lyn was wryly blunt about it. ‘When she heard about the Gyrel gift, she hoped your father would strike it rich here in the nebula. Rich enough to make her another Purple Empress.’

Even the laser-diamonds left her disappointed. They had never led her father to the fine strike she longed for, and the few he found weren’t worth much except to curious scientists. Interesting, maybe, but too queer and black and cold for jewels.

Jil was only seven when her father and Captain Macharn left on their last flight. They were taking a scientific expedition deep into the deadly heart of the nebula to look for the unknown birthplace of the laser-makers. Their starship was the Iron Argo. Tachyophone calls came back from Gamma II, where they took on reaction mass, and from Freeland IV, where they left a sick starman, but that was all.

Her grandfather kept promising that they could still get back safe, but her mother used to sit crying all day in the faint, stale perfume scents that clung to the Ulnar heirlooms she had brought with her from Terra. She wanted to take Jil back there, to her family and the world she still called home, but there was no money until her father’s insurance could be paid. Waiting, they stayed on in her grandfather’s old house at Hawkshead Pass.

‘Baby doll, you don’t know.’ Her voice was turning bitter now. ‘We’re stuck way out here on the backside of nowhere. Nothing but mud and dust and brutalizing danger. No culture anywhere. We’ve got to get out before the nebula wrecks your life and makes a horrid hag of me.’

The insurance took too long, because it had to wait for proof of presumption of death. Her grandfather said it had to be delayed because her father might come back, and Jil loved him for letting her hope. She used to talk to him in the tiny upstairs room he had kept for himself.

It was bare and very clean. She nearly always found him sitting at the window on a hard chair he liked, looking out across the starport. She would sit on the narrow cot where he slept, asking him about the Gyrel gift and the planets in the nebula and the old heroes of the Legion.

He was always very cheery, trying not to disappoint her, but of course Commander Kalam and Hal Samdu and the great John Star had all been men. Even old Giles Habibula, who was no hero at all. Though unknown planets were left in the nebula, most of them were too hot to be explored. Gently, he reminded her that she shouldn’t keep hoping to inherit the gift.

She tried not to let that hurt.

Sometimes he let her walk with him down the hill to the Pass and on to the starport. Though he never drank much, he liked to sit in the Quasar Club or the Hawkshead House and sip one small glass of Nebulon wine. After she had promised not to tell her mother, he would let her come inside with him. She could have a plain synfruit ice, and they would listen to the dusters.

These were men and women on their way into the nebula or, now and then, coming back. Starpilots and spacemen in Legion green. Miners and traders and colonists with families. Some he used to talk to her about as they walked back home. Con men and gamblers and terraforming engineers. Sometimes people he thought were fugitive criminals or political exiles. People he called utopian reformers and missionary evangelists. People her mother despised, but they filled him with a wistful admiration.

‘The breed I used to be!’ His old eyes lit. ‘Out on their own, daring everything for one last chance at space and freedom and the style of life they want. If I were only young again –’

Sometimes when he paused he looked very solemnly at her. She thought he must be wishing she had been born a boy, though he was far too kind to say so.

‘I saw the old worlds once,’ he told her. ‘When I went back to the Academy. I got one taste of what they call civilization. That little was too much. Too many people and too little freedom. Everybody smashed into the same hard mold, forced to live exactly like everybody else.’

He stopped to frown at her.

‘A thousand different social systems, all too much alike. They take your liberty away, always in the name of some high-sounding abstraction. They feed you – though not very well. They keep you busy at some dull job. While they’re stifling your mind. Maybe they’re what has to be, back on those hive-worlds. A lot of people seem content. The nebula was never meant for women. Anyhow, not for women like your mother.’

‘It’s what I want.’ Jil squeezed his hand. ‘Even if I wasn’t born a boy!’

The year she was nine, Captain Macharn got back from inside the nebula.

2

Jil went with her grandfather to see the captain in the hospital on the old Legion base. They found him sitting propped up in bed, staring at the window. He jumped in a frightened way when they spoke, and she saw he didn’t know them.

She hardly knew him either, because something had changed him so dreadfully from the great laughing man she had loved so much. Something had shrunk him. His skin was bleached to a pale yellow color, and it hung loose on his big bones. His eyes had turned yellowish around the pupils, which looked huge and black and glassy. When they stared at her, she thought they were filled with a suffering and terror she couldn’t understand. His lax lips twitched, as if he wanted to speak but couldn’t. She crouched away from him, behind her grandfather.

‘Shon –’ Her grandfather’s whisper was hoarse and broken. ‘Don’t you know us?’

His gaunt head moved in a queer, jerky way. Those terrible eyes glared at her and back at her grandfather. His shriveled face twitched again.

‘Who are you?’ His voice was stronger than she expected, yet stiff and strange as the way he moved. ‘What – you – want?’

‘Don’t you – don’t you remember us?’ Her grandfather leaned closer, speaking louder. ‘I’m Lyn Gyrel. Your pilot’s father.’ He reached for Jil’s arm, and she felt him trembling. ‘Don’t you know Jil? Jef’s daughter? The little imp you always tried to spoil?’

She tried to say hello, but no sound came. She had begun to smell a bad odor, like the burnt-sulphur reek of the meteor storms and more like the bogs down around Black Lake, where Terran fish couldn’t live, but worse than either one. It made her feel queasy.

His gritty voice rasped again, ‘What’s this – this place?’

‘Hawkshead Pass.’ Looking pale, her grandfather reached to touch him. ‘Shon, what’s hit you? And my son? What’s become of my son?’

‘Hawk?… Head?’ Moving like a clumsy puppet, Macharn slapped her grandfather’s hand away. He blinked around the room and back at them, whispering harsh, breathless words: ‘Am – still – in nebula?’

‘You’re almost – almost out.’ Her grandfather flinched from the slap and those wild yellow eyes. ‘Where’s the Argo? Did you wreck –’

‘Got to –’ he grated. ‘Got to get – outside –’

A nurse at the door was beckoning, but her grandfather didn’t move until she tiptoed in and touched his arm. White and trembling, he hurried Jil out of the hospital then and back to the old house on the hill, saying nothing at all.

That night she had a terrible dream. It was winter, with the nebula blazing green and red across the sky. Her father and Captain Macharn were walking on the ice across Black Lake. The ice was too thin. It crackled and broke. They sank into the bog, splashing the thick yellow mud. Somehow they couldn’t scream for help, but she saw the terror in their staring eyes.

She waded out, trying to help them. The freezing mud had the hot-sulphur smell of the meteor storm. It tried to suck her under. Her father kept waving her back, but she slogged on until she couldn’t move and the rotten bog stink took her breath. When she finally woke, shivering and cold, she was afraid to try to sleep again.

Morning came at last. Her grandfather was going back to the base to find out more about Macharn, and he let her come with him. The Legion scout ship that had brought the sick man out of the nebula was standing at the service dock. The corporal at the gate had no authority to admit civilians, but he said they could look for the ship’s commander at the Hawkshead House.

They found him in the lounge, sitting alone at a corner table. He was Pilot-Major Kynan Star, a lean, straight man as tall as her father had been. He looked tired and grim, but his solemn brown eyes warmed when he saw her, as if he wanted to smile. He stood up when her grandfather told him who they were.

‘I was hoping to meet you, sir, because I knew your son.’ He turned to Jil with a sad little bow. ‘Your father. He was my friend. A brave and able starman. I’m sorry we couldn’t bring him back.’

Her grandfather was asking about the Iron Argo.

‘No news, sir.’ He looked distressed. ‘Sit down, and please forgive me’ – he shook his head at the half-empty bottle on the table – ‘if I’ve had too much.’

He held a chair for Jil as if she had been grown up, and they sat down.

‘You must understand that search operations deep in the nebula are seldom possible.’ He looked at them both, making sure they understood. ‘It’s too vast and too hostile for our little squadron. Macharn and your son had special orders for a flight far beyond our normal operating range. Too far for any search. Macharn’s rescue now is sheer accident.’

He reached for his drink, and she saw his hand quivering.

‘We’ve seen him,’ her grandfather said ‘I wish we hadn’t.’

‘I wish I hadn’t.’

‘What – what hurt him?’

Kynan Star squinted at his spilling glass and set it carefully back without drinking. ‘I’m afraid to guess.’

They waited for him to say more.

‘A hard thing to talk about.’ He looked at the bottle with a wry little shrug. Or even to think about.’

‘The pilot was Jil’s father,’ her grandfather reminded him. ‘We’ve got to know what happened to him.’

‘I’ve no idea.’ His tired eyes peering unhappily at Jil, he tried to explain. ‘The nebula has always swallowed starships and men. It seldom tells what happened. When they go inside, that’s a risk you take. It gets greater as you approach the core.’

‘But you did find Macharn,’ her grandfather said. ‘We need to know how and where.’

‘If you think that will help.’ He shrugged as if he knew it wouldn’t. ‘We picked up a distress call. From Fuego IV. That’s too far in for civilians. The Legion has it on the Red List, but that doesn’t keep the dusters out. Not when they’re striking it rich. They opened Thorium Lode a dozen years ago and shipped a lot of ore.

‘Till the cliffdrillers struck.’

‘Drillers?’ Her grandfather blinked. ‘I’ve heard the tales, but I never saw a driller.’

‘Nobody has – not really.’ The trouble lines in his face bit deeper. ‘They strike in the dark and hide again when they’re through. But I saw what they did to Thorium Lode.’

Jil wanted to ask him what the drillers were.

‘Creatures.’ He had seen the question on her face. ‘There was life on these stars before the shockwave struck. Some of the toughest things survived, mostly on worlds still too hot for us.’

His tired eyes went back to her grandfather.

‘You don’t find drillers in space labs or museums, because they don’t get caught. Most of what we have is rumor – some of it I guess invented to discourage rival prospectors. But the drillers are said to be rock-eating moles with a special appetite for heavy metals and anything radioactive. Maybe able to migrate across space.’

Her grandfather shook his head in a doubtful way, but he let Kynan Star go on.

‘All I really know is what we found at Thorium Lode. Once a rich camp. Several hundred dusters working there, men and women tough enough to laugh at the risks – till the drillers hit. One midnight. No warning at all. The people who could got off into space. We found the rest huddled on a little hill a few kilometers from where the settlement had been.

‘The camp itself was gone. Mine workers, ore mills, shipping docks, business street, dwellings – eaten! I walked across the site. Not a scrap of metal anywhere. Solid bedrock crumbled into the finest dust I ever saw where the drillers must have burst out and burrowed back.

‘We took the survivors aboard. Not one had seen a driller, because the creatures came from underneath. Ships and structures just sank into the ground. Fast, they said, in a noise and dust that left them deaf and choking for breath.’

He shook his head with a grim little smile.

‘You’ve got to respect those dusters. Half-naked, most of them, because they ‘d had to run with what they could grab, but they got off the Sunmark at our first stop. Going back to Fuego, when they can, in spite of the drillers and everything else.’

Sadly, he shrugged at Jil.

‘That’s about it.’

‘Not yet,’ her grandfather said. ‘Not till you tell us about Macharn.’

‘Staggered aboard with the rest.’ Kynan Star’s worry marks bit deeper, as if he hated what he had to say. ‘In the rags of a Legion uniform. Collapsed on the deck. At the point of death, with a set of symptoms our medics had never seen.’

‘How had he got there?’

‘Nobody knows.’ He was looking very solemnly at Jil.

‘He was too far gone to talk. I questioned the dusters, but none of them remembered seeing him around the mines or anywhere before the raid. They thought the drillers must have brought him, but I don’t see how that could be.’

He spread his empty hands.

‘About my son?’

He shook his head at Jil.

‘If you found Macharn, can’t you –’

‘We weren’t searching.’ Kynan Star’s voice turned flat and bitter. ‘The fact is, we’ve no resources for that. I don’t like to say it, sir, but these times are bad for the Legion. Perhaps our human worlds have been at peace too long. Perhaps too many listen to the Antiacs –’

He saw that Jil was puzzled.

‘The Antiacs are peace kooks,’ he told her. They laugh at the Legion. Deny we ever saved mankind. Claim instead that we ourselves caused the old space wars. Say we should have gone out unarmed to meet the Medusae and the Cometeers and let them be our friends. They want to disband the Legion and get rid of AKKA –’

‘AKKA?’ Her grandfather gasped. ‘Leave ourselves naked?’

‘AKKA is our great weapon.’ He spoke again to Jil. ‘A secret weapon, entrusted to the Keeper of the Peace to be used only as our desperate last defense. The present Keeper is a woman – in fact, a second cousin of mine. Named Vivi Star.’

He smiled very solemnly at Jil when he thought of Vivi Star.

‘A lovely girl when I knew her, but that was long ago. Chosen to be Keeper, she had to give up the sort of life we both had known. A sad time for me. Almost as if she had died. I suppose she’s in some fortress, under Legion guard, but everything about her has to be a supreme secret now.’

Wondering what the Keeper’s life would really be, Jil thought the great secret of AKKA must surely be exciting enough to make up for whatever she had to leave behind. She wanted to ask if she might ever be chosen for one of the Keeper’s guardians when she had grown up and trained in the Legion, but Kynan Star had already turned to her grandfather.

‘Insanity, sir!’ he was muttering. ‘Contagious insanity! The Antiacs are playing politics in the Hall of Stars. Diverting funds to their pet special interests. Already starving the Legion here in the nebula. Threatening to pull us out altogether, leaving the colonists to defend themselves – if they can.’

He stood up, with a grave little bow for Jil, and asked them to excuse him. He said he was sorry he couldn’t bring her father back, but perhaps Captain Macharn would get well enough to tell what had happened to the Iron Argo.

He walked away slowly, looking burdened with trouble and older than he was. Jil felt sorry for him and sad about her missing father. She had begun to worry, too, about the Antiacs. She didn’t understand why any human being could want to be rid of AKKA and the Keeper of the Peace, and she felt afraid that when she grew up there might be no Legion left for her to join.