Endgame (11 page)

Shaking, we climbed down the ladder, two hundred meters or more. It was a straight shot, not staggered the way human ladders generally are: if one of us were to slip. . . . I nervously watched Sears and Roebuck above me, but I shouldn't have worried; their legs may have been ridiculously short, but they were powerful—all due to the high gravity of the Klave homeworld. Arlene and I were more likely to slip and fall in the relatively modest gravity of the planet, about 0.7 g.

The world looked like the Mojave Desert, or maybe we just happened to land in a desert area. I hadn't gotten much of a look during the crash. I looked up. The sky was too pale, but I saw oddly square clouds, almost crystalline; we had weather, evidently. Bending down, grimacing, I lifted a handful of sand: the grains were finer than Earth sand, fine enough that I decided Arlene and I should wear our biofilters; really, really fine silica can clog up your alveolae and give you something like Black Lung Disease. Thereafter, we spoke through throat mikes into our “lozenge” receivers. I don't know what Sears and Roebuck did when I pointed out the problem; they had their own radio.

The brownish gray sandscape depressed me. Under a pale sky, the only spots of color were the green and black of our standard-issue combat suits and Sears and Roebuck's muted orange flightsuits, which they had worn ever since the mission began. Everything else was the color of dingy gray socks that hadn't been washed in a month.

“Okay, S and R, what the hell did you mean about us being shot at?” My tongue couldn't help exploring the new hole in my mouth, where the tooth had been; the hole still throbbed, but the sharp pain was gone.
Gotta get S and R to fix this,
I promised.

“Meaned what was said; they were firing at us shots from cannons.”

“Energy weapons, artillery shells, what?” Extracting usable information from Sears and Roebuck was worse than sitting through a briefing by Lieutenant Weems—may he rest in peace for a good long time.

“Were firing they slugs from the electromagnabetic accelerating gun.”

“Um, a rail gun?” asked Arlene, picking up on the answer faster than I. Anything to do with exotic technology or weaponry was A.S.'s subject—she could lecture for hours on ogre tanks and orbiting “smart spears,” and she sometimes did.

“Yes, the rail gun,” confirmed Sears and Roebuck. I sort of knew what a rail gun was: you took slugs of depleted uranium, encased them in a ferromagnetic shell casing, and accelerated them to several kilometers per second velocity using electromagnets. The resulting “gun” could damn near put shells into orbit—they moved so fast, they punched through any sort of imaginable armor like a bullet through thin glass. It was a horrific weapon we had never been able to make work properly. The first shot always destroyed the target, but generally also our rail-gun prototype!

I licked dry lips. If the enemy—Newbies or
Freds?—could build a tactical-size version, our combat armor would be utterly useless; if we ever took a shot, we'd be toast.

The desert was evidently deserted; but the solitude did not begin to compare to the vast loneliness of the starry void. I stared at the desolation, taking some comfort in the feel of ground beneath my feet, the breath of wind against my armor. The air smelled tangy—ozone—but so far I was breathing all right. “Hey S and R,” I called, softly under such a sky, “is that ozone from our ship, or is it natural to the atmosphere?”

“We didn't detect it orbitally,” they answered in unison. I shrugged. If any of us had asthma, it might have been a problem. But I never had any, Arlene's was cured by the doctors at NAMI, and Sears and Roebuck could take care of themselves.

“Which way toward the dinks who were shooting at us?” Arlene asked. Sears and Roebuck turned slowly through the entire 360-degree panorama, then pointed basically along the twenty-seven kilometer trench our ship had dug. Arlene turned to me, raising her brows like a pair of question marks.

Toward or away from danger?
Didn't seem to be much of a choice. S and R had detected no signs of civilization on the planet—no powerlines, power-plants, canals, or structures larger than two or three stories. If there was anything smaller, it wouldn't have shown up on their quick microwave scan. So far as I could tell, the only sign of intelligent life was the gun battery that had pounded our ship into rubble.

Oh, what the hell!
“Let's at least eyeball the wogs and see who they are. My guess is they don't belong here any more than we do.”

The air temp on the desert Arlene dubbed the Anvil of God was livable; Sears and Roebuck hadn't lied. But they never claimed it was comfortable . . . and 60 degrees centigrade certainly didn't qualify.
Our helmets kept the direct sunlight off our heads, and we had several days' worth of water if we used the recirc option, pissing into a tube and recycling it back to the drinking nipple. Arlene was not happy about doing that. Being a female, this meant she had to strip and pee into a bedpanlike device, whereas I just wore a sheath. There were no trees, so no privacy. She could have turned her back, but in a typical act of defiance, A.S. just did it right in front of me and the Klave. I pretended nonchalance, as if women urinated in front of me all the time—Arlene had done it before, anyway, in combat situations. But in reality I was shocked and embarrassed every damned time . . . but I sure wasn't about to let Arlene know that! I would never hear the end of it.

We cut off the furrow about two klicks laterally and paralleled it, figuring that whoever was shooting at us would follow the skidmarks to see what he had shot down. The armor monitored the outside air, regulating heat venting to prevent us showing a hot signature on an infrared optical device, and we kept the mikes cold and ultrashort range—outside of five to seven meters, the fuzzy signal attenuated into the background noise. We had a reasonably good chance of not getting caught, and, damn it, I wanted to see those bastards with their itchy trigger fingers, see them up close and personal!

We had passed directly over the battery about fifty klicks back; the journey would take us at least two days and some . . . but after only ten kilometers, we ran into a scouting party from the wogs driving some kind of land cart. Not literally ran into—we picked them up when they were still five klicks range, tracking directly along our ship's wake.

Trusting to our electronic countermeasures, we loped toward them until we were within half a klick; at that point, we dropped to our bellies and crawled the remaining distance, while the bad guys broke for
lunch. Arlene and I were both hungry, but we were rationing our Fred food . . . and especially our Fredpills.

We got within a hundred meters, easily within range of my M-14 BAR and the lever-action .45-caliber rifle that Arlene toted for those occasions where a shotgun just wouldn't do. We watched them through our scopes, trying to figure out who they were.

They looked oddly human, but their heads and bodies were covered by thick pressure suits that might have had battlefield capability. Their proportions were humanoid. There were four scouts and one supervisory type with a notepad built into his wrist armor; I can smell an officious, jerky sergeant a klick off.

“Sarge,” Arlene said faintly over the radio, “there's no cover, and we can pop most of them before they burrow into the sand. We can take them before they know what hit; they might not even get off a message.”

I hesitated—not a good move for a battlefield non-com, but sometimes you really
don't
have enough intel. “Hold your fire, A.S. Let's see if we can hear them first.”

I programmed my electronic ears to scan sequentially all sixty-four million channels, looking for anything non-random; I caught a few tiny bursts of information, but nothing that lasted longer than 0.02 seconds, according to the log. “You pick up anything?” I asked.

“Fly, I'm getting bursts of pattern from channel 23-118-190 that last about 0.02; they
all
last just that long. You seeing that?”

“Now that you mention it—”

“I think whoever they are, they use much narrower frequency channels than we use; we're kind of scanning past them by scanning up and down within the
channel. Let me small this thing down and just scan up and down at that freq. Stand by.”

I would have done the same thing, except I hadn't exactly paid attention during my techie classes in radio-com. I waited, fuming, while Arlene made the necessary software adjustments. I kept the aliens in my scope, following their progress up the “road” formed by our long skid to rest. Finally, she finished tapping at her wrist and came back to me. “Here, plug into me.” I fitted my female connector over her wrist prongs. A couple of seconds later, I started hearing what obviously were words in recognizable sentences.

There was something damnably familiar about the rhythms and pauses in the speech; I was sure I had heard it before. Even the words sounded tantalizingly close to something I could understand—a little clearer than Dutch, I reckoned. If I strained, I could
almost
make out what they were saying.

I realized with a chill that there was no almost about it: I
did
understand them—they were speaking English! But it was a harsher, colder kind of English, peppered with utilitarian gruntlike words I had never heard. I could even tell who was speaking by the odd mannerisms they used when they made a point. Now that I knew they were human, I could even see their body-language expressions, though they held themselves with a studied limpness that irritated me. With omissions, I heard an exchange between the sergeant and one of the scouts.

“Are [new word] [new word]-destroyed ship?”

“Carried it [new word], sub-sir. Saw it [new word].”

“Was Fred; pattern-match was [new word], old ship from [new word]. Should have [new word]-shot back. Don't like this; something [new word].”

“[New word]-circle around impact [new word] and [new word] from another-different quarter?”

“Power emissions? Moving infrareds? Radio or radioisotope?”

“[New word], sub-sir. [New word] dead cold.”

“Don't [new word] circle. Approach [new word] but cautiously.”

I could follow the conversation despite missing every third or fourth word; they debated whether we had been destroyed or not. Their voices were distant and cold, as if they were discussing an advertising campaign instead of a military campaign. They sounded totally dispassionate, like perfect soldiers. I tried to hate them because of what they had done to us, shooting us down and nearly killing us all. But I just couldn't. Right or wrong, they were ours, and Marines always believe in pulling a buddy out of the crossfire. Besides, they had obviously thought we were Freds.

Arlene gripped my upper arm so intensely she left indentations that would probably remain for hours. Evidently she figured it out the same time I did. We didn't talk. Knowing they were English-speaking humans made us too nervous even to rely on the short effective range of our mikes. I spoke to her in hand signals:
Circle around, isolate one, capture alive.
I wanted to get that sergeant. I pointed to the stripes on my left shoulder, and Arlene nodded. But before she could move out, the prey moved away—on foot this time.

We paralleled them, following them back the way we had come. Arlene and I skulked, but Sears and Roebuck simply walked normally—I made them follow about two hundred and fifty meters back and hoped they had decent infrared jamming. I was desperately hungry for the sergeant, but when one of the humans fell behind, it was one of the scouts instead.

Well, if beggars were horses, choosers would wish.
Around other side,
I signed to Corporal Sanders. She shuffled silently through the sand, cutting around behind the straggler.
Three,
I signaled,
two, one, now!

Arlene and I charged forward from the dink's left
and right rear quarters, tackling him before he ever saw us. I pushed my forearm against his throat and leaned hard, cutting off any sound he might try to make, while Arlene ripped away every wire and fiberoptic cable she could find.

The prisoner stared at me, eyes as big as dinner plates. He clawed at my arm, trying to pull it loose so he could suck in a breath of air, but I wasn't budging. Arlene ran her receiver antenna all across his body, along every limb, and even up his crotch. She found two transceivers, two tiny fragile nodules sewn inside his uniform; she plucked them free and destroyed them by crushing them between thumb and middle finger. I let loose on his throat, just in time; he sucked in huge lungfuls of air, trying to breathe through the ozone. I grabbed him under his arms, Arlene got his feet, and we ran, carrying him between us, for about half a klick.

We pushed him into the dust and lay next to him; Arlene cuffed him with a plastic tie, while I lay across him and watched his pals through the scope. It took them another two hundred meters before they realized he had been picked off; they backtracked, but by then the fickle wind had blown the ultrafine sand around, obliterating our tracks. As they began to fan out for a spiral search, calling him repeatedly over the radio, A.S., Sears and Roebuck, and I withdrew far from the canyon carved by the Fred ship . . . and even that gouge was filling, starting to be hard to spot. At two kilometers directly perpendicular to our trail, I called a halt. I figured we were far enough along that they weren't likely to find us anytime soon, now that we had destroyed all of the prisoner's electronic tells . . . we hoped.

I knelt down next to the guy. He looked vaguely Mongolian and vaguely Mediterranean, a perfectly normal human with black hair and dark brown eyes, dark-complected, with slight Oriental folds over his eyes. But from
when?
How far advanced was he over
us? We had left Earth some three or four hundred years ago; I wasn't really sure of the conversion factor. But when did
he
leave?