Endgame (2 page)

“FLY!”
she screamed, slinging her rifle aside and running up to me.

I sank to one knee, holding my arm; it wasn't bleeding bad, but I was knocked off balance by the blow—and by the knowledge that had Arlene reacted a fraction of a second slower, I would have been stretched out on the steel deckplates, coughing up my own blood.

Completely calm now, Arlene Sanders un-Velcroed my Marine recon jacket and gently slipped it off my arm. When she saw the wound was just a crease, and I would recover in a couple of days, she let loose with a string of invective and obscenities that was Corps to the core! They echoed off the black saw-toothed walls and rattled my brainpan.

She shook me viciously by the uniform blouse. “You dumbass bastard, Fly! What the hell were you
thinking,
jumping into the line like that? Don't answer! You
weren't
thinking, that's the problem!” She let me sink back to the deck, suddenly nervous about
overstepping the chain. “Uh, that's the problem,
Sergeant
,” she lamely corrected.

I sat up, wiping away the tears on my good sleeve. “Arlene, you dumb broad, I was thinking thoughts as deep as the starry void. I was thinking, now how can I finally get that catatonic zombie girl's
attention
and snap her out of her despair over Albert?”

“Jesus, Fly, is that what this is about?”

I put my hand on my shoulder, massaging the muscle gently through my T-shirt. “Lance, I was about ready to hypo you into unconsciousness for a few days to let you work it all out in your dreams. God knows we have enough time—two hundred years to Fredworld, or eight and a half weeks from our point of view. I was just about ready to give up on you.”

Arlene stared down at the deck, but I wouldn't let up; I finished what I had to say. “I can't afford to lose you, A.S. Those binary freaks Sears and Roebuck are a great source of intel and sardonic comments, but they can't fight for crap. I need you at my back, A.S.; I need the old Arlene. You've got to come back to me and work your magic.”

She turned and walked away from me, leaning against the hot bulkhead and swearing under her breath. She couldn't really say anything out loud, not after I had made a point of dragging rank into it (I called her “Lance” to drive home the chain of command). But nothing in the UCMJ said she had to like it.

She didn't. She wouldn't speak to me the rest of the day, and all of the next. She took to sulking in the big lantern-lit cabin we had dubbed the mess hall, since that was where we took our meals—well, used to take them; Sears and Roebuck were still holed up in their own stateroom, cowering in terror at the upcoming brawl with the Freds when we hit dirtside; and Arlene ate Anywhere But There, so she wouldn't have to eat with me; when I entered, she left by another portal, so
I ate alone. Then when I left to return to duty (staring out the forward video screen, wondering when something would happen), Arlene snuck in and hid away from me.

I barely saw her any more often than I had before . . . but I felt a thousand percent relieved, because now she was
angry
rather than desolate and apathetic. Anger. Now that I have a good handle on. I'm a Marine, for Christ's sake! What I couldn't understand was despair.

Angry Marines don't stay angry for long, especially not at their NCOs. Sergeants are buttheads; we'd both known that since Parris Island! After a while, Arlene took to haunting the mess hall when I was there, sitting far away; then she sat at my too-tall table, but at the other end; then she got around to eating across from me . . . but she glared a hell of a lot.

I waited, patiently and quietly. Eventually, her need for human company battered down her fury at me for risking my life like I did, and she started making snippy comments.

I knew I'd won when she sat down four days after the shooting incident and demanded, “All right,
Sergeant,
now tell me again why you had to do something so bone-sick
stupid
as to step in front of a live rifle.”

“To piss you off,” I answered, truthfully.

Arlene stared, her mouth hanging open. She had shaved her hair into a high-and-tight again, and it was so short on top, it was almost iridescent orange. Her uniform was freshly laundered—Sears and Roebuck had showed us how to use the Fred washing machines when we first took over the ship, two weeks earlier—and I swear to God she had ironed everything. She had been working out, too; she looked harder, tighter than she had just a few days earlier, and it wasn't just her haircut. Now I was the only one getting soft and flabby.

“To
piss me off?
For God's sake, why?”

“A.S.,” I said, leaning so close we were breathing each other's O
₂
, “I don't think you realize how close I came to losing you. Despair is a terrible, terrible mental illness; apathy is a freaking
disease.
I had to do something so shocking, something to give you such a burst of adrenaline, that it would jerk you out of your feedback loop and drag you, kicking and screaming, back to the here and now.”

I scratched my stubbly chin, feeling myself flush. “All right, maybe it was pretty bone-sick stupid. But I was desperate! What should I have done? I don't think you know just what you mean to me, old girl.”

She slid up to sit cross-legged on the table, staring around the huge empty mess hall. No officers around, and no non-coms but me. Why not? “Fly,” she said, “I don't think
you
know just what Albert meant to
me.
Means—meant—is he dead or alive now?”

“Probably still alive. It's only been about twenty years or so on Earth . . . or will have only been by this point, when we get back there—by which point, it'll have been two centuries. It's weird; it's confusing; it's not worth worrying about.” I ate another blue square; they tasted somewhat like ravioli—crunchy outside and stuffed with worms that tasted half like cheese, half like chocolate cake. It sounds dreadful, but really it's not bad when you get used to it. A lot better than the orange squares and gray dumplings, which tasted like rotten fish. The Fred aliens had truly stomach-turning tastes, by and large.

“Fly, when I first joined the squad—you remember Gunny Goforth and the William Tell apple on the head duel?—you were my only friend then.”

I remembered the incident. Gunnery Sergeant Goforth was just being an asshole because he didn't think women belonged in the Corps—not the Corps and definitely not the Light Drop Marine Corps Infantry—and no way in the nine circles of hell, not by the livin' Gawd that made him, was Gunnery Sergeant Harlan E. Goforth ever going to let some
pussy into
Fox Company,
the machoest, fightingest company of the whole macho, fighting Light Drop!

He decreed that no gal could join his company unless she proved herself by letting him
shoot an apple off her head!
And Arlene did it! She stood there and let him take it off with a clean shot from a .30-99 bolt-action sniper piece. With iron sights, yet.

Then, with a little malicious sneer on her lips, she calmly tossed a second apple to Goforth and made him wear the fruit while she did the William Tell bit. We all loved it; to his credit, the gunny stood tall and didn't flinch and let her pop it off his dome at fifty meters. After that, what could the Grand Old Man do but welcome her to Fox, however reluctantly?

Back in the Freds' mess hall, Arlene continued, nibbling at her own blue square. “You're still my best and first, Fly. But Albert was the first man I
really loved.
Wilhelm Dodd was the first guy to care about me that way; but I didn't know what love meant until . . . oh Jesus, that sounds really stupid, doesn't it?”

I climbed onto the table myself, and we sat back to back. I liked feeling her warmth against me. It was like keeping double-watch, looking both ways at once. “No. It would have sounded dumb, except I know exactly what you mean. I felt that once, too: young girl in high school, before I joined the Corps.”

“You never told me, Sergeant—Fly.”

“We got as close as you could in a motor vehicle not built for the purpose. She swore she was being religious about the pill, but she got pregnant anyway. I offered to pay either way, and she chose the abortion. After that, well, it just wasn't there anymore; I think they sucked more than the fetus out, to be perfectly grotesque about it. . . . We stopped pretending to be boyfriend-girlfriend when it just got too painful; and then she and her parents moved away. She just waved goodbye, and I nodded.”

Arlene snorted. “That's the longest rap you've ever given me, Fly. Where'd you read it?”

“God's own truth, A.S. Really happened just that way.”

Arlene leaned back against me, while I stared out the aft port at the redshifted starblob; the mess hall was at the south end of a north-going ship, 1.9 kilometers from the bridge, which was located amidships, surrounded by a hundred meters of some weird steel-titanium alloy, and 3.7 kilometers from the engines, all the way for'ard. Sitting in the mess hall, we could look directly backward out a huge, thick, plexiglass window while traveling very near the speed of light relative to the stars behind us.

It was a fascinating view; according to astronomical theory—which I'd had plenty of time to read about since we'd been burning from star to star—at relativistic speeds, the light actually
bends:
all the stars forward press together into a blue blob at the front, all the ones aft press into a red lump at the stern. I wasn't sure how fast we were going, but the formula was easy enough to use if I really got interested.

“I just had a horrible thought,” I said. “We only brought along enough Fredpills to last a few days. We didn't plan on spending weeks here.” Arlene didn't say anything, so I continued. “We'll have to find the Fred recombinant machine and figure out how to use it; maybe Sears and Roebuck know.” Fredpills supplied the amino acids and vitamins essential to humans that Freds lacked in their diet; without them, we would starve to death, no matter how much Fred food we ate.

“Fly,” she said, off in another world, “I'm starting not to care about the Freds anymore. I know why they attacked us: they were terrified of what we represented, death and an honest-to-God soul, and maybe the god of the Israelites is right, huh? Maybe
we're
the immortal ones . . . not the rest of them, the ones who can't die.”

“So are you thinking that Albert still exists somewhere,
maybe in heaven?” I was trying to wrap myself around her problem, not having much luck.

She shrugged; I felt it roughly. “So he himself believed; I would never contradict an article of my honey's faith, especially when I don't have any contrary evidence.”

“Translation into English?”

“I've just stopped caring about the Fred aliens, Fly. They're frightened, desperate, and pretty pathetic. And they're
soulless.
I mean, two humans against
how many
of them? Even when Albert and Jill joined us, we were still four against a planetful! And we kicked ass. Maybe it's just the Marine in me, but I'm starting to wonder why we're bothering with these dweebs.”

“Well, we've got about forty-five days left to get our heads straight for what's probably going to be the final curtain for Fly and Arlene, not to mention poor old Sears and Roebuck. They may be soulless and lousy soldiers, but put enough of them in a room shooting at us and we're going down, babe.”

Arlene reached into her breast pocket and pulled out two twelve-gauge shells, which she tossed over her shoulder to land perfectly in my lap. “I've saved the last two for us, Sarge; just let me know when you're ready to Hemingway.”

F
orty-five days is a hell of a long time when we knew we were dropping into a dead zone, even for the Light Drop. Then again, it's not really that long at all . . . when that's probably our entire life expectancy.

Arlene snapped out of her despair because she didn't want to spend her last few weeks in a self-imposed hell, I guess. She had me, I had her; that's how it was in the beginning, that looked to be how it would end. Except we both had Sears and Roebuck, and that's where everything started to break down.

We're Marines above all, and we're programmed like computers to protect and serve, you understand. That means we couldn't just lock and load, stand back to back, and prepare to go down in a hail of Fred-fire when the ship cracked down and the cargo doors opened on Fredworld. We had this crazy idea that we had to protect those two—that one?—Alley Oop, Magilla Gorilla look-alike Klave, or at least try.

Step one was to coax it, her, him, or them out of the damned stateroom. We tried the direct approach first: Arlene and I climbed “up” toward the central axis of the ship. The acceleration decreased to 0.2 g at the level of Sears and Roebuck's quarters, barely enough to avoid my old problems with vertigo. I sure didn't want to go any farther inboard, that was for damned sure.

Arlene didn't look bothered, though; various parts
of her anatomy floated pretty free under her uniform, and she looked like she was loving it. I tried not to look at such temptations—fifty-eight days left; I wanted to spend it with my buddy, not trying to force a relationship that had never existed and never ought to exist.

The “upper” corridors were like sewer pipes, corrugated and smelly. The Freds breathed slightly different air than we, but it didn't seem poisonous (Sears and Roebuck swore we could breathe the Fred air). Very tall corridors, to accommodate the Freds when they were in their seed-depositing stage, like gigantic praying mantises . . . I couldn't reach the roof even by jumping.

Arlene and I slipped and slid down the hot slimy passageway; it took me a few moments to realize that the slime was decomposing leaves from their artichoke-heads.