Endgame (21 page)

“Ssssslave,” hissed the spiney.

“No, you're not anybody's slave—”

“Masssster!”

I ground my teeth. There was something fundamentally wrong about this conversion. This wasn't how it was supposed to go! The spiney was supposed to wake up and take charge of its own life, not pick
me
to be its God instead of the Freds!

Still, I had to play the hand I was dealt. “Look what the false ones did to you!” I trumpeted. “They left you here to be hurt and set you against—against your true master!”

“Falssse onesss!”

“They turned you against me, and now they must pay! Death
—death to the false ones!”

“Death to falssse onesss!”

“That is our mission, our holy mission—destroy the false ones!”

“Misssion dessstroy falssse onesss!”

I winced and made a mental note:
Try not to use so many S's around spineys!
“And the second—and the other thing to do is find the other mistress, Arlene.”

“Find missstressss.”

“But, Christ, where
is
she?” I wondered out loud. In the first reality, I found her only after jumping from the first site of destruction on Phobos through the Moloch gate to Deimos. We found each other, both naked and trembling, in a room with an inverted cross stamped out of red-hot metal. But if she had any brains, and no one's ever accused Arlene Sanders of being
stooopid,
she would stay put where she found herself and wait for me to find her, too. Well . . . if she
could
stay put; circumstances might make it tight.

“Get up, slave,” I said. I decided to play the game to the hilt, if that was what the spiney needed. But I couldn't shake the uneasy feeling that maybe the Newbies
programmed
the monsters to be gullible, susceptible to my conversion—like Ninepin, this one seemed awfully easy to convert! Maybe that's exactly what the Newbies wanted to study. Was I giving away intel to the enemy?

Hell, what else could I do? Couldn't bloody well fight them if n I died in the simulation, could I?

The spiney rose, towering over me, but I lowered my Sig-Cow anyway. If it wanted to jump me, it would always have opportunity; just then, I chose to assert my authority by force of will alone. “Tell me your name.”

“Sssslink,” she answered; from that moment, Slink was a female to me. “Sssslink Sssslunk.”

“Slink Slunk. You're my first convert, the first apostle. We're going to have to gather an army, since I left mine behind in, um, heaven.”

“Sssslink learn power ssssoon?” Power? She must
have meant the power to affect the “reality” of the simulation.

“Sure, kid, soon. Now lead us downward. I want to get this crap squared away. Step one: we've got to find Arlene . . . the other person like me, the other living human. Can you smell us?”

“Sssslink can ssssmell,” she confirmed. Slink stared around the room suspiciously, still tasting the air with her snaky tongue. She didn't seem to trust it, sipping it like fine wine, as if it bore scents warning her of dangers lurking below us.

“Smell her out, Slink. Find my lance. But along the way, you're going to have to work with me to convert as many others of your kind to our cause as we can. Got that? No fighting or killing unless absolutely necessary.”

“Ssslink undersssstandsss.”

I started to ignore the hissing, which was probably caused by her forked yellow tongue. I remembered where the ladder was that led down to the next level, and I remembered a stadium full of zombies with rifles and shotguns, and more spineys who might not be as accommodating, between us and the ultimate level of Phobos, deep below. I remembered what waited down there: a pair of hell princes. I was not happy about facing them again.

We continued through the acid room to a long corridor, and there we, as a pair, met our first hosts of the undead. Three zombie girls shambled forward, one of them topless and missing an arm, the other two UAC workers—all armed with weapons stolen from Fox Company Marines who didn't need them anymore. Slink held up her hands. “Sstop!” she commanded. The zombies paused, obediently.
Damn, that's right,
I thought.
The spineys have some sort of mental control over the zombies.

“Thiss not real. Massterss dead. Join forcess, kill Newbiess!”

The conversion was not a big hit among the zombie
gallery. Maybe the
original
spineys had psychic control over the reworked humans, but evidently when Slink converted to my cause and accepted the unreality of her world—mostly because of my demonstration, I realized, not by faith—she lost her ability to tap into the Psychic Freds Network. The damned zombies just wouldn't listen to her!

The one-armed topless girl raised her hand. She held a five-shot revolver—nothing serious unless she got truly lucky with a shot. But I wasn't about to wait for her to start plinking. Before she could squeeze off a round, I pointed my rifle and fired one shot from the hip. At that range, if I'd have missed, I would have turned in my Marine Corps T-shirt. I took her amidships, sinking her in her own wake.

There was a time when I would've felt disgust and revulsion against myself for shooting a woman. I longed for such a time; now I felt only grim joy at having cut down another undead monster.

The other two zombies opened fire, unperturbed by their companion's obliteration. I dropped behind an ornate rosewood trellis left over from when this section of the UAC facility was a visitor's center. Fortunately, these undead were proving to be just as bad a pair of marksmen as the ones in real life; it probably had a lot to do with the fact that they never blinked, and their eyes were perpetually so dry they could barely see.

I dropped to my butt to steady the rifle—couldn't expect too many bursts of luck firing from the hip—and fired a round into the farthest of the two (she had the better weapon, some sort of bolt-action rifle; the other had a shotgun and was too far for it to be effective). If I had any doubts about my new convert, I buried them; she hocked and spat into her hand, then hurled the flaming ball of snot into the face of the shotgun-toting zombie-gal.

The shotgunner screamed a combination of pain and rage and started firing her shotgun in our direction.
A few of the pellets struck me and burned like hell, since I wasn't wearing armor yet.
I don't find it until the next level down,
I remembered. But I stuck to my plan and pumped three more rounds into the riflegal until she finally dropped before turning my attention to the shotgun zombie. By then, she was dead, burned into a blackened corpse by Slink Slunk, my first apostle.

When the battle abruptly ended, I sat still for a long time, head bowed.
God,
I prayed,
can You really make me go through all this again?
I took a deep breath and stood, a Marine again. “All right, if that's what has to be, then it has to be.” But what would happen in the Resuscitator simulation if I died?

Damned good question: can a spirit that's nothing more than bits in a huge computer go to heaven? Or would my death mean my absolute obliteration?

“Screw it,” I muttered. Marines are riflemen first and philosophers never. “Come on, Slink, let's get the hell out of Dodge.”

I led her through the long corridor between the trellises to the door that led to the ladderway down. The next level was Godawful, as I recalled: a black-dark maze, spineys galore, and maybe even the first pinkie—the horrible demons who were all mouth, bigger even than the mouth of doddering old Mick Jagger; he was threatening a comeback tour when Arlene and I upshipped from Earth, six months and three hundred and fifty years ago. . . . I wondered if he still was?

I won't go into every freaking battle of every freaking level; if I could believe Overcaptain Tokughavita, it's already been thoroughly documented, and everybody who might be interested has already read about it in school. It was the same game, the same terrain, but this time, I gathered converts like a snowball. It was never the majority opinion. Slink and I were pretty soon joined by four other spineys (Whack, Sniff, Chomp, and Swaller), a pumpkin
named Olestradamus, and even, God help us, a
zombie
that used to be Pfc. Dodd, the man that Arlene once sacked out with for a few months. In the previous version of reality, we ran into Dodd on Deimos, not Phobos, so I knew my abused brain was playing games with memory.

The architecture was even more movable than before, since now it needed only the whirr of computer software, not hydraulics, to slide walls up and down, to open floors beneath our feet, even to shift entire sections of the UAC facility from one side to the other. My goal remained the same as before:
find Arlene!
But now I had a different plan once I found her. Somehow, we had to find a way for the ghosts to break
out of
the machine.
I swear to Almighty God,
I promised,
that I will not die in software limbo; I'll jack my way out of this place, me and Arlene, and get my ass back to the real world!
The only question was whether I'd manage to do it before the Newbies “fixed” the entire human race.

Slink, the other apostles, and I lived on medikits and snarling blue spheres; I ate the food thoughtfully left behind by the UAC workers and my own comrades of Fox Company when they gave up the ghost; I didn't want to think about what my followers ate. The only real advantage to being back where it all began—in simulation, at least—is that I didn't have to worry about amino acids and vitamins and whether or not Fred food or Newbie food was edible by humans; I didn't have to monkey with food-supplement pills, purify water, or eat lumps of so-called “food” that looked like overgrown escapees from a box of Lucky Charms. Blue squares! Orange squares! Pink dodecahedrons!

When we climbed down to the third level, what felt like half a day after I first appeared for the second time at the mouth of the overrun facility, we were greeted by a welcoming committee of five spineys, several zombies, and even one of those spectral ghosts
that sounded (and smelled) so much like pinkies, even though we couldn't see them. I finally had my biggest question answered: how in the world, in
this
world, would Slink and Chomp and my other spiney converts fight against others of their kind? So far as I could tell, their flaming snotballs had no effect on each other due to the oily and obviously flame-retardant secretions from the glands along their backs and chests.

We dropped heavily from the ladder into a whole frigging pool of the toxic goo, and I actually felt it eat quickly through my boots and start in on my feet. I ran like hell across the mess—right into the waiting embrace of the defenders of the faithless.

I fell back against the wall, firing off shot after shot from an over-and-under I had liberated from ex-Corporal Magett. When the last shell was exhausted, I dropped the shotgun and unslung my Sig-Cow. I couldn't see my buddies. I thought sure as hell I was going to renege on my promise to the Almighty about not dying in this limbo.

Four spineys—I had killed the fifth—swarmed me, and I took three flaming mucus balls to my face; my skin felt like it was parboiled off'n me, and I couldn't see for crap. I raised the rifle and fired blindly, wishing I could cry—apologizing over and over, under and under my breath, to Arlene—another Fly failure! Then one of the huge brown monkeys screamed in agony and whirled to face its attacker.

It was Pfc. Dodd, Arlene's ex, screaming in his unmistakable high-pitched voice, unchanged even after reworking; he shot it again with his own Sig-Cow. I forced my eyes open a bit wider to aim a round and planted it deep into the spiney's brainpan. Two down, three to rip me to pieces.

But suddenly the other three spineys came under assault from a rain of huge sharp stones! I dropped to my ass to avoid the bombardment—it was a veritable
intifada
of my spiney apostles!

I guess they figured out that their snotballs wouldn't do anything to their heathen brethren . . . so they started ripping chunks of masonry out of the walls and using that as a weapon! God, faith was already working miracles on the spineys' thought processes.

They drove their enemies back and back, killing two of them. One was knocked silly, and we later converted him—he's the spiney who called himself Swaller. When they were all dead, fled, or better bred, Slink and Chomp, who were starting to become an item, hunted up a blue sphere for me. They cradled it carefully on a piece of plastic camouflage netting they stole from a dead Marine's helmet and smooshed it into my face, thank Christ. I went from zero to sixty in 1.2 seconds, and I actually felt human and alive again. Meanwhile, Whack and Sniff rounded up all the unexpended rounds of ammo they could scrounge.

Days passed—it sure seemed like days, but maybe it was “really” only a few microseconds—and I was already in the habit of drawing a huge question mark over any time indicator and writing
subjective time!
beneath it, ever since Arlene and I started flitting around the galaxy at nearly the speed of light. This was just another example of relativity, I reckoned. But it seemed like days to us, and that's all I can say: days passed, and we were finally ready for the last descent into the final horrific level on Phobos.

We were about to come face to face with our first hell princes—and the gates of Moloch that led to a whole new limbo on Deimos. I hesitated at the top of the long, long ladder that led down nearly a kilometer into the crust of that tiny moon Phobos.
Phobos means fear,
I remembered, though I didn't know what the significance was. “Okay, boys and girls,” I said. “Are we ready to rock 'n' roll?”

They nodded. Swallowing hard, wondering where in
this
world I would find Arlene Sanders, I put a foot and hand on the ladder and began the long descent
into blackness. Below me I heard an inhuman scream that still, after all and everything, caused my stomach to contract and my sphincter to clench. I recognized that scream.