Endgame (14 page)

“Oh.” Light began to dawn on marblehead. “You mean this ship was built for humans?”

“Sarge, this ship was built
by
humans!” She stood, making a wide gesture that included the entire ship, not just our little white cell. “All of it—the whole ship was built by human beings—and I'll bet if we looked at the engines, they would say Pratt and Whitney or Northrop!”

“Jesus . . . so we're out in space on our own, now? Not just piggybacking on a Klave ship or hijacking some Freds?” I stared. Everywhere I looked, now that I was looking for it, the decor screamed Western European American human. Even the language was basically English with a lot of slang words we didn't know.

All right, so the Earth had become some sort of social-welfare semi-capitalist world-wide government—but it was still ours. We had won the freaking battle, oo-rah!

“Notice something else about the ship, Sarge?”

“Look, knock it off with the Sarge stuff. I'd rather be Fly when we're alone. Save it for the troops. What else about the ship?”

“Sorry, Fly. Um . . . oh, that's right; you were unconscious when they loaded us aboard. Fact is, I thought sure you were dead. I was barely awake myself, and after they got me here, they shot me full of tranks and I was out until I woke up with you.” She leaned toward me, tapping her eyes. “But I wasn't
completely
unconscious when they scooped us up after the Battle of Quicksand Hill. I pretended to be, and I got an eyeful.”

“All right, spit it out, Lance. What did you see?”

“Hmph! Now
you're
the one with the rank thing, Sergeant Fly. I got a good look at the outside of the ship. Two things: first, there are English-language markings on it, or at least they're using our alphabet; this thing is designated TA-303. . . . Does that mean there are several
hundred
ships in the human fleet?”

I scratched my head and shrugged. “I don't know how the Navy numbers ships, Red, if it still even is the Navy. But you're probably right that they wouldn't be numbering in the hundreds if there were only three or four of them.”

“And second, Fly-dude, the thing was tiny—barely three hundred and fifty meters long and no wider than an aircraft carrier from our era.”

I thought about the Fred ship—3.7 kilometers long and almost half a klick in diameter. Most of that was engine, which meant—

“Arlene, are you saying this ship is much more
advanced
than the Fred ship?”

“Not just in engineering tech, Fly. Did you notice when they took us to Torture Theater, we went up a long series of spiral ladderways?”

“Yeah. So?”

“We went up about eight flights.”

“Yeah. So?”

“Fly, that's more than half the diameter of the ship.”

“Yeah. So—” I froze in mid-dismissal. The significance suddenly struck me. If you ascended past the centerline of the Fred ship while the ship was parked on the tarmac, suddenly all the decks would be upside down. The Freds induced acceleration that functioned like gravity by spinning the circular ship, so the outer deck had the heaviest gravity and the inner core was zero-g.

But the ship was built like a building—they never intended gravity to pull any direction but one! “Christ, girl. We've got artificial gravity—
real
artificial gravity, like in ‘Star Trek'!” I sat down and thought for a moment. “Arlene, didn't Sears and Roebuck say that the gravity zones left behind by the First Ones, the guys who built the stuff on Phobos and Deimos, the Gates and stuff,
couldn't possibly work
on a ship—not even theoretically?”

She nodded gravely. “Yup. Obviously, this ship is more advanced than what the First Ones built.

“Fly, I've been trying to reconcile all of this with the pace of human technological development. Now maybe I'm just getting cynical in my old age; I don't think so—I still think we can take control here and win this thing. But criminey, Fly! Interstellar travel
and
artificial gravity
and
extraordinary medical advances, all in a couple of hundred years—starting from a
completely destroyed civilization?”

I stared, saying nothing. The creepiest feeling was dawning across me.

“Fly, does that sound reasonable to you? Even considering that we evolve so much faster than the Klave or the Freds?”

I slowly shook my head. When we left Earth, we were fighting for our lives. Humanity had been set back at least fifty or seventy-five years—our cities destroyed, nuked; bacteriophages sweeping the globe; the Freds had just perfected their ultimate terror weapon: genetically engineered monsters that looked just like human beings, until they opened fire on you. The aliens had the power to move entire
planets
around like bowling balls! And they had what we called the Fred ray, an immensely powerful blob of energy that cut down everything in its path.

Arlene was right; it was pretty freaking hard to believe that in only two centuries we'd move from
that
to
this
. In fact . . . “Arlene, I know of only one race that evolves that fast.”

“You and me both, Sarge. I mean, Fly.”

I looked around, feeling my stomach clench. “These guys are Newbies? Not humans?”

She shook her head. “No. Why would the Newbies evolve into human-looking critters? They go forward, not back! Look, we know these guys left Earth a hundred years ago, two centuries after we did. But we
don't
know when or if they encountered the Newbies—or when they suddenly got this explosive burst of technological creativity. What if—?”

“What if,” I took over for her, “the Newbies ran into humans decades ago? Look, we don't know where the Newbie homeworld is; maybe it's closer to Earth than the Fred base we went to first, less than sixty light-years away. What if somehow they met us and influenced us to evolve more at the Newbie rate than our normal rate, fast though it was?”

Arlene leaned close, not that it would help if there were sensitive dish-mikes trained on us to pick up
every sound. “What if the Newbies
are
here after all, here with the humans—but we just can't see them for some reason?”

I told her about the overcaptain reading invisible readouts from somewhere above Arlene's prostrate form in sickbay. “This ain't good, Lance; I don't like the idea of invisible Newbies running around like ghosts in the machine.”

She sat down on the hard bunk, closing her eyes to the relentlessly white bulkheads. “I don't like any of this, Fly. I don't like the idea that faith, not brainpower, turns out to be our weapon. I'm on shakier ground there than you or—or Albert would have been.” She put her hand to her chest; she'd twice had an engagement ring from her beloved, and she wore the ring on her dog-tag chain. Then we went through one of the Gates built by the First Ones, and, of course, the ring vanished with everything else.

Then the Klave recreated it for her, and she was happier than she had been since the jump. But we jumped
again,
and it was gone again; now, she often put her hand where the ring used to hang, remembering it as vividly as if it were there. . . . It represented Albert's offer that Arlene never had time to accept.

I put my arm around her. On Earth it had been over three hundred years—three hundred and forty, to be exact, adding up all our trips. But still, for us it had been only four months since we went on without Albert, and only five months since we saw Jill . . . whatever her last name was.

It was all pretty damned confusing. I just couldn't seem to wrap my brain around all this relativistic bouncing around the galaxy. And we were at least another hundred years away from home, even if we started today and headed straight back!

“Fly,” Arlene said, “let's keep a good watch tonight when we interact with these . . . people. Maybe we'll pick up some intel that will either blow this theory away or—or confirm it.” I held up a fist; gently, she
rapped it with her own. But the normal Arlene Sanders would have smacked it so hard, a big Marine “fist salute,” that my knuckles would have been ringing for several minutes.

That evening, as we followed the officious jerk of a clipboard sergeant to the mess, people stopped talking when we approached and cringed as we brushed or bumped them. We were celebrities . . . but celebrities on a freak show.
See the monsters! Beware, for their F-A-I-T-H may be infectious!

This time, I paid particular attention. We definitely climbed higher than the midpoint of the ship could possibly be, so Arlene was right: the ship was built for gravity always being the same direction. They must have had an artificial gravity generator.

The mess hall was actually a long narrow room, almost like a corridor, with a center table along which people sat in individual chairs. With a guard holding each of my arms, the overcaptain walked us downstream right on top of the table itself! I labored not to step in anyone's plate of food or kick over any wine glasses.

The pair of guards slapped me down in a central chair and locked a metal band around my waist like a seat belt. I didn't try to tug at it; it was pretty clear I wasn't going anywhere. They plopped Arlene down in the chair directly opposite me, locking her in as well with a resounding click.

The room was darker than I preferred, but after the Fred bases and Fredworld, we had gotten pretty used to darkness. Each person had a different set of plates and silverware, and when they ate, they hunched forward and hooked one arm around their plates as if worried the guy on the other side was going to steal their food—a lot like a former convict my father used to employ when he worked managing the Angertons' farm.

Equal number of guys and gals. Now that I looked close, I noticed that nobody wore exactly the same
uniform. Like in the United States Army before the twentieth century, everybody had his own variation on a common theme: Overcaptain Tokughavita, to my immediate right, wore dark blue trim around the seven pockets on the front of his uniform blouse; the woman sitting next to him had no trim, and the two guys opposite us had five and six pockets instead of seven. The farther away from the overcaptain, down the table, the wilder the variation: I saw a hat that was a cross between the Revolutionary War tricorner and a Texas ten-gallon, one woman had mini-wings sticking out the backs of her shoulders. The uniforms (is that the right word when they're not uniform?) tended toward red and burnt umber at the extreme left of the table, where the hats flattened out and looked like berets with spikes.

Suddenly, I noticed Sears and Roebuck at the leftmost end of the table, but they didn't look at me. They must have known we were here. Nobody could have missed our ceremonial entrance, walking along the tabletop—nobody else entered that way!

People trickled in and out all through the meal. I began to get the idea that these humans made virtually a fetish of individualism verging on the solipsistic: each person lived in his own little world, almost unaware of anyone else except when he needed something from outside.

The food was different for each person, too—none of it very appetizing from my point of view. My main course tasted like boiled steak in suitcase sauce. But it was better than the Fred food, even the blue squares, and I was reasonably sure that humans couldn't have changed much biochemically in only two hundred years, so the food was probably nutritious enough to keep me and Arlene alive.

Once, someone dropped a knife with a clatter, and a whole section of table panicked! Then, when they saw it hadn't killed anyone, they returned to their meal as if nothing had happened.

During the meal, there was certainly a lot of intel to pick up; in fact, it seemed these humans didn't even have the concept of classified data or even personal discretion. Arlene was right; all the big bursts in creativity occurred just about sixty years ago. But there were no Newbies that they reported.

Sears and Roebuck didn't say a word to us; they acted as if they had never seen us before and weren't particularly interested now. I took the hint and left them alone, hoping they hadn't abandoned us and were just playing some game to get on the humans' good side.

The crew of the ship—called different names by different crewmen, of course, but mostly called
Disrespect to Death-Bringing Deconstructionists
—still seemed fascinated by our faith, me in God, Arlene in her fellow man. They inched toward us as if afraid to touch, still worrying about “catching” faith.
You bet your ass it's infectious!
I thought. I made as much contact as I could, putting my hands on people's shoulders, shaking hands (they knew what it meant but didn't like doing it—it meant recognizing the existence of other people), kissing the girls. I got about as much response from the latter as you would expect. . . . It was like kissing nuns.

T
he crew mobbed us, asking all sorts of basic questions, baby questions, about faith and hope. “What if have faith in something and doesn't happen? Can hope for someone to suffer? Does matter if have
faith in yourself but not in external God?” I sensed a purposefulness sweeping the room, centering first in one person then another, almost as if an inquisitive intelligence were flitting from brain to brain, asking a question, then moving on to the next person.

First, Overcaptain Tokughavita asked, “How can still have faith in basic goodness of humans if personal experience tells otherwise?”

Arlene surprised me by taking that one; I'd always thought she was the cynic. “It doesn't matter what some people do, or even like most people—I mean, sure a lot of people, maybe most of them, will do bad stuff when they think no one's looking. But if you've ever known someone who
won't,
someone who really practices his moral system all the time—and I have known someone like that—then you know what we're
capable
of. Maybe we don't always live up to it, but the basic decency and goodness is in our design specs. We just need some technical work.”