Endgame (27 page)

I dismissed most of them and called a conference with Arlene, Tokughavita, the engineer Abumaha, and Sears and Roebuck. “Boys—and you, too, A.S.—there must be some kind of emergency exit here, just in case the worst-case scenario happened, and we had to deploy everything on hand immediately. Is there a set of instruction manuals, help systems, officer-training course . . . anything?”

Everyone shook his head. “I haven't seen a damned thing,” Arlene said, “and I've been looking.”

“The designers wouldn't probably let such datums loose in the ships, in the event to enemy capture,” Sears and Roebuck suggested with entirely inappropriate cheer. I guessed they were happy so long as no one was shooting at them, or likely to do so in the foreseeable future.

We kicked it around a bit, and everyone agreed we were all ignoramuses. Very productive meeting. Now I knew why officers got the big bucks. But something had been tickling the back of my brain through the whole useless disaster, something somebody had said. I ran back the conversations in my mind . . . and abruptly I realized it was something
I'd
said: I'd mentioned Ninepin. If only we had him—he knew everything, though his loyalty was a bit questionable!

“Arlene, you remember what Ninepin said about how long it took to build him?”

“Now that you bring it up, I think it was something ridiculous, like four or five hours, wasn't it? Fly, you're not thinking of trying to build another one . . . are you?”

We stared at each other, struck by the same thought. “Toku, you remember that big green ball that followed us around?” I asked. “What was that?” From across the table, the overcaptain, who had zoned out and was looking out a porthole and picking his teeth, jerked back to attention. “Big green ball? Oh, yes, was Data Pastiche. Had it installed, hoped would pick up information about ancient human culture.”

“Yeah, yeah, and it reported back to the Res-men about us. Are these Data Pastiches common? Would we find one on this ship, maybe?”

Tokughavita shook his head. “Never saw before. Was prototype. Never used, don't know how.”

“Who would know?”

“Man who built.”

I sighed in exasperation. “Well, who else, since the man who built it isn't here?”

Tokughavita looked puzzled.
“Is
here. Is Abumaha Blinky. Didn't know?”

Arlene had been half listening, bored as the rest of us, but she jumped into the conversation with both feet. “Abumaha built the thing?
Our
Abumaha?”

“Our Abumaha, Sanders-san.” Tokughavita slicked back a patch of hair that insisted upon curling around forward.

I leaned over and shook him awake, describing Ninepin, but Blinky didn't have the faintest memory of building it! “Must jolly well have been under spell of Resuscitators, pip-pip.”

I spread my hands helplessly. “Well, did you take any notes? Draw schematics?”

Blinky's face brightened. “Maybe, maybe, Jack! Kept data stack from way back, maybe used from force of habitat.” He disappeared, reappeared ten minutes later in high excitement. “Yes, yes, is on nodule, damn good lucky!” Sears and Roebuck seized the interval in between to escape with their lives.

I gestured to the engineering lab and we sealed Blinky Abumaha inside. The other five who knew engines prepped the ship.

Nearly a day passed, but there still was no word from Blinky. When I knocked, he muttered something incoherent and refused to come out, not even to eat. Sears and Roebuck had completely disappeared into the bowels of the ship—God only knows how they even fit through the passageways!—but they must have found a cabin far away, because we didn't see them again for the rest of the trip.

The ship was fully set, waiting for the command, when
finally
the scuzz emerged, rank and disheveled, and rolling out behind him was . . .

“Ninepin!” Arlene and I shouted simultaneously.

The little bowling ball was crystal-translucent this time, not green at all. It said nothing, merely rolled on past, right over my toe, to a console that controlled the compression field for the hydrogen—and incidentally interfaced the ship's mil-net. Ninepin II bumped into the bottom of the console again and again until I picked it up (it allowed me to do so) and placed it directly onto one of the nodule sockets. Ninepin glowed brightly for nearly an hour.

“He's downloading the entire freaking ship!” Arlene whispered in awe.

Then it stopped and announced, in a peevish, irksome voice, “Have finished inloading. Please replace on deck.”

I picked him up and put him down, squatted over him, and started the interrogation. “Ninepin, do you know where the tunnels are to escape from this boulder?”

“No,” he said succinctly.

“We can't get out?” Arlene demanded. “You mean we're stuck here forever?”

“Can get out, not stuck. Not tunnel, emergency escape separation.”

I leaned over the ball. “Okay, Ninepin, listen closely. I have more seniority than anyone else in the service, so I'm in charge of
PARI.
I need to know how to activate the emergency escape separation. Now how do I do it?”

Everyone—all the humans and Sears and Roebuck were still MIA—leaned close to hear the answer, but Ninepin wanted to verify my authority. “Taggart Flynn, born 132 BPGL; joined service 113 BPGL; time in grade, 263 years. Seniority confirmed. Rank: sergeant; command nonauthorized, higher ranking personnel present.”

We all turned to Overcaptain Tokughavita, who turned red under the attention. He cleared his throat, looking at me.

“Toku,” I said, “why don't you give me the authority?”

He inhaled deeply, looking from one anxious face to another. Then he seemed to deflate, nodding in acquiescence. “By powers vested in me by Commons of People's State of Earth,” he intoned, “hereby commission Taggart Flynn Lieutenant of Citizens of State.” My mouth dropped open, but Tokughavita wasn't finished. “Hereby . . . resign own commission and resign Party membership.” He looked defeated, but determined.

The scream heard across the galaxy was my own. Despite it all—though I smashed the idea down a dozen times when some Fox Company chowderhead would suggest it, and ignoring
my
feelings in the matter—in the end, the damned Marine officer corps got its claws into me after all! My face turned purple with anger, and Arlene laughed her butt off. “So what is your first order,
Lieutenant?”

Still flushing, I barked, “Nothing to you,
Edith!”
This provoked a new round of laughter from Arlene, so I gravely repeated my order to Ninepin: “The emergency escape separation, activation!”

“Separation initiated at Lieutenant Taggart's order,” announced the damned bowling ball. I swear, when I become king, all Data Pastiches will be annihilated.

Nothing seemed to happen. We sat around the table looking stupid until suddenly Arlene glanced out the viewport. “How cow! Fly, c'mere, you're not going to believe this!”

I leaned over her shoulder, stared out the porthole, and gasped.
The entire moon
was splitting in two! A crack formed in the wall of the great central lunar chamber our ship was trapped in. It grew wider and wider, and soon I could see stars through the crack. In the space of fifteen minutes, the two hemispheres of
PARI
pushed apart from each other, connected by a thousand telescoping pylons. The connecting tubes snapped off like reeds in a storm. Of course, all this destruction and horrific shifting of forces happened in utter silence, since there was no atmosphere inside the hollow sphere.

The
PARI
moon base cracked in half like a planet-egg, the two pieces rushing away from each other at 107 kilometers per hour, according to the radar tracker. We waited impatiently—it would be at least two hours before they had separated far enough to risk a straight-line barrel-run with the ship, newly christened the
Great Descent into Maelstrom
by Blinky Abumaha . . . and the
Solar Flare of Righteous Vengeance Against Enemies of People's State
by Tokughavita. I planned to let the two of them duke it out for control of the history books.

I sat in the captain's chair—we had one, despite the weird individualistic streak of our communist apostles, not quite as iconoclastic as the Freds—with Ninepin on my lap, stroking his smoothness as I would a puppy's fur. He didn't object; he didn't take any notice until he was asked a question. I suppose I may as well have been petting a network terminal, but
I had developed an affection for the talking bowling ball. Sure got me in trouble a lot, but then so did a puppy.

“My God,” I said for about the millionth time. It was all I could think, watching the enormousness of the engineering. “I hope Sears and Roebuck know what they're missing.”

“Oh, they're probably watching and pouting from their stateroom. Yeesh!” Arlene leaned over and asked Ninepin the question that I should have asked minutes before: “Who built this place? Was it human-Resuscitator symbiots?”

“Not symbiots,” said Ninepin. “Human construction. Mission launched nine years before People's Glorious Revolution, construction begun in year 96 PGL, completed 142 PGL.
Disrespect to Death-Bringing Deconstructionists
assigned to
PARI
lunar base launched year 13 PGL.”

“My God.” This time it wasn't me; Arlene was the inadvertent petitioner. I was too busy wondering how many other far-flung human bases there were . . . and what terrifying aliens were following
them
home.

“Wait,” said Arlene, “that's too long. . . . We're only 107 light-years from Earth. How come it took the
Disrespect,
ah, 137 years Earth-time to get here?”

“Disrespect to Death-Bringing Deconstructionists
stopped at following ports of call between Earth and this system, designated PM-220: planetary system designated—”

“Skip it,” she said. The names wouldn't mean anything to us anyway.

At last, although the moon continued to split apart, we had a clear enough path to the stars. I suggested that Blinky could probably pilot the ship out of lunar orbit, and he decided I wasn't an idiot and throttled up the engines. I wasn't sure I liked this system: I'm used to giving and getting orders, not having a philosophical discussion whenever we needed to move. But it had its advantages: every man and woman in the
armed forces was capable of acting entirely autonomously—a whole military full of Fly Taggarts and Arlene Sanderses, no matter what silly political ideology they espoused!

There was no hurry. The ship would take many days to ramp up to speed, then an equivalent number to slow down. In between, we had five months of subjective travel time
—five months!
I thought about complaining, writing a strong letter to the manufacturer. But the weird fact of
proxiluminous
(“near lightspeed”) travel was that notwithstanding our subjective travel time of five months, vice the seven weeks for the Res-men, both trips would take just about 107 years in
Earth-
time, with us lagging only about twenty-five minutes behind. If it weren't for our twenty-nine days of acceleration vice only six days for the
Disrespect,
we would arrive while they were still maneuvering into orbit.

But with that damned acceleration factor, the Newbies would have a three-week jump on us. I shuddered to think what they could do in twenty-three days to poor abused Earth, still reeling from the three-generation war with the Freds when Tokughavita and his crew left.

There was no hurry, but my heart was pounding, my pulse galloping a klick a minute. It was all I could do to sit in the command chair and act, like, totally nonchalant, like I did this sort of thing every day: jump in my proxiluminous-drive starship and pursue molecular-size aliens who wanted to infect all of Earth and “fix” us!

“Hey, Tofu,” I said. He didn't notice or didn't catch the reference. “So when did the Resuscitators find you guys and infect you?”

Tokughavita looked pensive. “Do not know. Been trying to clarify. Were not symbiots when left People's Planet, sure of that.”

“Don't you remember?”

“No memory. Remember actions, not when infected
by Resuscitators—may not have noticed if turned off sensory inputs. Long before landed at PM-220, rebuilt engines en route, went over ship systems with hand of history.”

The overcaptain didn't know, or the aliens had blocked it from his mind. They left Earth 137 years ago Earth-time, but they had visited many other planetary systems and bases before arriving at this one. The molecular Newbies could have infected the humans at any port of call along the way.

Arlene and I discussed it in private. “So what did happen to them?” I asked. “They left Newbie-prime in a ship, attacked Fredworld—then what? What happened to their ship?”

She shrugged, making a nice effect with the front part of her uniform blouse. “Search me.” (I wouldn't have minded.) “They must have headed here, but I don't know why or how . . . Jesus, Fly—maybe they
didn't
set out for Skinwalker; maybe they only ended up here later. Remember, it was
forty years
that the dead Newbie was on Fredworld. . . . Plenty of time for them to meet humans somewhere, change their course, and send out a general Newbie alert to tell all their buds where they were going.” Arlene stood at the porthole, watching us drift slowly toward the crack. She spread her arms wide, stretching and almost touching the bulkhead on either side, so narrow was it.

We kicked the idea around a bit, but really there was no way to settle it. Some questions must remain forever unanswered.

I returned to the bridge when we approached the edge and forced myself to sit still and not bounce up and down like an orangutan in a banana factory. Blinky Abumaha piloted the ship about like I fly a plane: we didn't actually crash into anything, but it wasn't for lack of trying. By the time we finally found a big-enough hole that Blinky could make it through without scraping the sides—about seventy
kilometers—my jaw ached from clenching it, and my lips were like rubber from the frozen half smile I had maintained. I was surprised my armrests didn't have finger marks on them. But we finally, by God, made it out of the
PARI
moon—intact.