Endgame (26 page)

We hoisted ourselves up and inside. It was a hell of a tight fit; it was meant for about five Freds and was stuffed like a comedy sketch with eighteen of us (including two gigantic Klave, much bigger than the Freds even in their seed-depositing stage). We swarmed over one another like termites; now, if it had been me and seventeen girls, I could get into the possibilities. But I detested making inadvertent contact with other males, so I pushed myself into a corner and just observed.

Sears and Roebuck clumped up to the driver's seat, walking over people like they were rocks across a stream. They both squeezed into the side-by-side pilot and co-pilot chairs and started flipping levers and twisting dials.

The interior was very podlike: spherical, uncomfortable, dark and metallic, stuffed with nav equipment. It smelled like a mixture of machine oil and—
sour lemons!
Shades of Phobos and the zombies. One entire end was taken up by a huge bulge poking halfway to the center of the pod—probably the engine cowling.

“Preparing yourself for taking immediately off!” Sears and Roebuck warned—and without giving us even a moment to do so, they pushed the button.

The whole freaking pod exploded. That's what it felt like when it detached from the ship—a huge gut-wrenching explosion. People and gear flew everywhere,
and something really hard creased my cheek. Arlene screamed, but it was more a yelp of surprise than pain or agony.

We rose like a bullet. As soon as we cleared the ship and started to fall back, Sears and Roebuck rotated the pod and kicked on the chemical rocket engines. They accelerated at only a couple g's, enough to get us moving. My God, but they were loud! My entire body pounded, thumping at the resonant frequency of the frigging engines. I couldn't hear a thing—the noise was beyond hearing. I plugged my ears (everyone did), but it didn't help much.

Then the Klave flipped on the big boys, the fusion drive, and we roared away from the desert planet at an even eleven g's. That was the end of my reportage.

The humans all passed out, and by the time Sears and Roebuck revived us, we were coasting in zero-g—my favorite!—in a mini-Hohmann transfer orbit toward eventual rendezvous with the tiny artificial moon. Sears and Roebuck piloted like apes possessed, cheerfully informing the assembled multitude that “we should make able the moon just before out of running of reaction mass! Good damn chance!”

Their quiet understated confidence was starting to keep me awake nights.

W
e hit the moon at “dawn.” Dawn is a location on the moon, not a time. It's tide-locked, so each lunar day is an entire lunar cycle of fourteen days; you can't see the terminator creep, as you can on
Earth if you stand on a mountain and look east across a plain (at the equator, the Earth's surface spins at about sixteen hundred kilometers per hour, a thousand miles per hour: circumference of the Earth divided by twenty-four). But the moon, smaller than Deimos, had an atmosphere! In the two hundred years since we'd been gone—or a hundred and sixty, actually; the moon was built forty years before and named
People Armed to Repel Invasion,
henceforth
PARI
—we humans cracked the secret of the gravity generators we found on Phobos and Deimos, the one final secret of the First Ones that no one else had figured out in millions of years of trying . . . but was it
our
achievement, or the Newbies'? When did they infect us?

PARI
had a gravitational acceleration of about 0.4 g, enough to hold a thin breathable atmosphere. God only knew who built the
original
gravity generators around Sol and the other star systems; it was one of the biggest mysteries about which the Deconstructionists and Hyperrealists were fighting—somehow the cause of the split, or one of the causes, if we could believe Sears and Roebuck! But still, neither Arlene nor I had a clue why . . . something about schools of lit-crit and eleven freaking story fragments.

The damned moon was deserted, like a ghost mining town in Gold Rush country. “Where are all the people?” I asked.

Tokughavita answered, unaware of the volumes his response spoke. “Joined ship when arrived, left with us to surface.” He had just admitted that the humans
abandoned their post!
There was only one reason they would have done that: the crew of the
Disrespect
had infected them . . . or vice versa.

We had to walk slowly across
PARI.
The atmosphere was about what it would be three-quarters of the way up Mount Everest, and even a slow walk left me panting and dizzy. The apostles weren't bothered; they said they had been “rebuilt” for greater lung
capacity, among other things. Arlene and I exchanged a look. So that was why we'd had such a damned hard time trying to take down Overcaptain Tokughavita! I started to wonder uneasily what their lifespan was: they were super-strong, probably immune to most normal nonintelligent diseases, and engineered to survive on alien worlds . . . and they worshipped
me
as a God?

I hoped I never disappointed them. Men don't take kindly to fallen idols.

It felt bizarre to be walking across an artificial moon the size of a cue ball, feeling gravity almost half that of Earth. Directly ahead a couple of klicks was a tall tower. Only the top half was visible over the horizon. The rest of the surface of the moon was a jagged series of black and white stripes, like digital zebra paint; I couldn't see any other structures—but, of course, the entire moon of
PARI
was one gigantic “structure.”

We made it to the tower from our touchdown point in just over three hours. The tower was actually three towers connected by numerous spans of metal ribbon—bridges I sincerely hoped I didn't have to pass, since they had no visible guardrails and were plenty far enough up to kill me if I fell, even in the low gravity.

“We, ah, don't have to climb up there, do we?” I asked Tokughavita.

“Not up,” he insisted. “Going down. Going down to battle fleet.”

“Fly,” Arlene said, “you know what those towers are? They're elevators! You can ride them up out of the atmosphere, or most of it. . . . Am I right, Blinky?”

She and the Blink-meister had gotten quite chummy lately; I was already getting nervous. “Yeah, yeah, right up!” he agreed with sickening enthusiasm. “Go up, fast, fast, make nose bleed!”

“Some other time, kids.” I felt like my own father twenty years ago.

We reached the base of the middle tower, and Tokughavita walked up and—I swear to God!—
pushed the down button
to summon the elevator, like it was a high-rise in Manhattan instead of a tiny artificial moon orbiting an alien rock. We waited thirty-five minutes by my watch, while the floor counter slowly climbed through the negative numbers toward zero. When it reached that magic middle, the monstrous doors before us, big enough to drive an upright Delta-19 rocket through on its rolling launch pad, cranked slowly open to admit our party of eighteen. I felt distinctly underdressed; I should at least have been wearing a ten-story robot construction virtu-suit. Tokughavita scanned the array of buttons and finally pushed the one labeled
C,
with a little icon of a dot in the center of a circle—
core,
I presumed. My adrenaline level skyrocketed just before we plummeted.

We started descending slowly, but within a minute, we were accelerating downward so close to the gravitational pull that our weight slacked off to about one percent of normal, just enough to keep the soles of our boots touching the elevator floor. We dropped sickeningly for close to forty-five minutes, so I guess the elevator hadn't been all the way down when we rang for it.

At last, we started slowing hard. I was almost kicked to my butt, and Arlene actually did hit the deck with a thud. It was three g's at least! We stopped hard and fast in about five minutes, but we'd been toughened by our ship travels and we didn't black out. Sears and Roebuck took the acceleration in stride, literally: they kept pacing up and back, impatient to see the “battle fleet” that Tokughavita talked about. I figured this must have been close to the normal gravity for a Klave.

When the door cranked open, my breath caught in my throat. Before us was a mind-numbingly vast hollow sphere in the center of the moon, so wide in diameter I couldn't begin even to guess its size. It was crisscrossed by hundreds of thousands of striped tubes—catwalks, presumably, connecting different areas.

“Beware,” said the overcaptain. “Is zero-g beyond elevator. Center of mass.”

A tube beckoned directly ahead of us. I bravely led the troops forward, my stomach pulling its usual flippy-spinny trick as soon as we left the gravity zone and entered weightlessness.

Tokughavita wasn't kidding about the human battle fleet. There were dozens of ships strewn around the inside of the hollow moon, too many to get an accurate estimate. Some were as short as the ship that just took off; others were longer than the Fred ship we'd hijacked to Fredworld. The nearest was about one and a half kilometers long, I reckoned. Blinky Abumaha pointed at it and said, “Damn fast ship that is, nearly fast as ship we left.”

“Nearly?” I got worried. I knew what that meant.

He nodded vigorously. “Damn fast. Get us to Earth only twenty days behind infested ones, counting acceleration time, if leave now.”

Twenty days! I figured that meant about a two-week acceleration up to nearly lightspeed and deceleration to match Earth velocity, assuming the
Disrespect
could get up to speed and back down in three or four days each way. Jeez, a lot can happen in twenty days; to the Newbies, it may as well be forty years, at the speed they evolved. “All right, ladies and gentlemen, let's haul butt over to the ship and stomp down on the kick-starter.”

It was an easy “trek” to the nearest ship, provided you had a boatload of patience. Fortunately, that's one lesson you learn double-time in the Corps. No
matter how fast we get our butts out of the rack and into our combats, pull on about a ton and a half of armor, lock and load enough ammo to sink a medium-size guided-missile frigate, and bounce out to the helo pad for a quick barf-bump to the rocket, sure as hell some 0-6 forgot his coffee cup or his inflatable seat cushion, and we have to stand by six or seven hours while everyone from second-louie to short colonel turns the camp upside down trying to find it.

You know how to move as quickly as possible along a zero-g tube, don't you? You line yourself up as best you can right down the centerline and give a shove off'n one end. Then you wait. If you're lucky, you get a good long trajectory down the tube until you hit a side wall. If you didn't aim too well, you crash in a couple of dozen meters. Either way, you have to find something solid to brace against and do it again. The stripes along the tubes turned out to be metal bands with footrests to kick off from; somebody was thinking ahead . . . probably a non-com; an officer wouldn't have the brains.

I got used to seeing Pyrex glide past me on all sides, like I was a fish swimming through a glass sewer pipe. It only took us a couple of hours for the first guy, me, to make it all the way to the ship, but we were all spread out, and it took another thirty minutes to get back into a clump. I won't say into a formation, because the “Jetsons”-era clowns under my command didn't even know the meaning of the word.

Turned out our little “reindeer games” on the Fred ship were good training. Arlene was especially grateful; she shot me a look of thanks when she cleared the transfer tube as “tail-end Charlene.” This really wasn't her forte.

The ship we picked was long and strangely thin. I worried a bit about feeling cramped since we would be in it for five months. It was shaped basically like a
dog bone, a klick and a half long but only a hundred meters in diameter; the endcaps were bulbous, giving the ship that “bone” look: one was the thruster, the other the feeder turbine for the scooped hydrogen.

Damn thing
was
cramped inside. The corridors were mostly crawlways, and they were kept at 0.1 g, according to Blinky Abumaha. The cabins faced off the crawlways, all of them long and squeezed, like a bundle of pencils. Well, what the hell; we were beggars here, shouldn't get choosy.

Inside, pale teal predominated with orange trim—a decorator's nightmare. Arlene liked it for some weird reason, possibly just because it was about as far as could be from a Fred ship. I discovered that if I wore red sunglasses, they matted out the blue of the walls, making the effect odd but bearable. We dogpiled into the place and started examining controls, instruments, and engines.

Six of the fourteen had flown one of these types of ships before, and between them and the networks, we got the engines hot. The only problem was we didn't have anywhere to go! I couldn't see a hole in any direction—and neither could the radar.

I grabbed Tokughavita by his uniform lapel. “Okay, smart guy, how do we get out of this thing?”

The overcaptain rubbed his chin. “Was afraid would ask question. Not sure, must consult mil-net.” He typed away at a console for a while, frowning deeper and deeper. By the time another hour had passed, I had to forcibly restrain him from ripping the terminal out with his bare hands and heaving it through the computer screen. The damned thing was command and menu driven—and Tokughavita didn't know the query command and couldn't find it on any of a hundred menus!

Arlene and I went on a hunt, trying to find the rest of our crew, who had scattered to the four winds, pawing through every system on the ship to find the
stuff they knew. I snagged eight and Arlene got the rest, but no one had a clue where a tunnel was or how to open it up if we found it. They had all
flown
on these sorts of ships before, but none of my platoon was a starship
pilot!
I cursed the miserable Res-men for not being soft-hearted enough to leave us Ninepin at least! Traitor or not, he was a useful font of intel.