Endgame (31 page)

We had searched the immediate vicinity of the star-shaped chamber after ducking out Arlene's crack, but we didn't find anywhere else to go but the huge Gate. “It's me,” she said, crestfallen. “I still remember the last time, and I searched for almost a whole day before giving up and heading through the Gate.”

The ground was jagged with sharp broken pieces of dead plant life, and the stench of sulphur almost knocked me out. The spineys seemed to love it,
though, and even Dodd looked a little less tormented. The sky overhead was inverted, white with black stars; I tried not to look at it, since it gave me vertigo like I'd never felt before, not even in zero-g.

“Fly,” said my partner. “I'm trying to remember how Olestradamus managed to escape his doom at the claws of the hell princes. He survived, didn't he? He's out here somewhere, waiting for us?”

I tried to “remember” it that way with her, but Olestradamus's death was too vivid. In the end, we both had to give it up—the poor pumpkin would have to remain our first martyr.

Damn it!
I thought.
What's the use of lucid dreaming if you can't actually control everything?
I didn't have a good answer, so I pointed wordlessly at the Gate.

Holding hands, we shot through, then we fairly flew through the Deimos base, avoiding traps we remembered, converting a few more monsters, and killing what we couldn't convert. We picked up a Clyde—despite my objections that I didn't remember the genetically engineered human with the machine gun until we got back to Earth—three more spineys, and a passel of zombie buddies for Dodd. We even managed to convert a fatty, but the planet-shaped critter with the fireball shooters where its hands should have been, Fats Jacko, he called himself, was so overweight that he just couldn't keep up. In the end, I dubbed him our first missionary and sent him off at his own pace to convert the rest of monsterland.

But before we got to the nasty spidermind at the bottom of Deimos, Arlene finally managed to find the Door.

She first started looking for the Door when she remembered the three courses in program design that she took during her brief stint in college. “Fly,” she whispered, while we crouched in the hand-shaped gully where Arlene had killed the Dodd-zombie the
last time. “Whenever we wrote a program, we always used to stick in what we called back doors. Maybe the Newbies did, too!”

“What the hell is a back door?”

She licked her lips, sighting along her .45 rifle at a lumbering pinkie. So far, it hadn't smelled us. We weren't worried about it hearing us; they made so much noise just walking and breathing that they probably wouldn't hear a freight train coming up behind them on the railroad tracks. But there were other creatures out there with acute hearing—silence was best.

“When you want to test some aspect of a program, you create routines to set the various variables to, well, anything you like.”

“Ah, setting variables. More college stuff. How's this supposed to help us, Lance?” College was insidious. You started out just to learn a thing or two, then suddenly—wham, bam—you're wearing lieutenant's butter-bars on your collar! No thanks. I would never become an officer—and I would never go to college.

“You need a combination,” Arlene answered. “A password to access these procedures, but if you have it, you can move around the software like a ghost in a haunted house, passing right through walls and doors like they weren't even there.”

I stared at a rough rock wall to our left. “You mean, if we found this back door, we could phase right through that stone wall?”

“Fly, if we found this back door, we might be able to
get out of the whole simulation
and get loose in the
Disrespect's
operating system.

I stared at her, feeling real hope for the first time in days—simulated days. “Jesus, Arlene! Maybe / should have gone to university!” We both stared at each other, shocked by the words that came out of my mouth. “Ah, that is just a joke,” I explained.

“All right . . . I'm remembering now.” She stared
at a particularly juicy rock. She grunted with the strain of “remembering” a Door. She sweated, but nothing happened to the rock. “Christ, I can't just visualize it from nothing!”

Too loud: a horde of imps heard and came over to investigate. We shot them from cover while they threw their mucus wads at us. I took a shot in the face and was blinded again—criminey! Arlene backed away, pumping shot after shot from the lever-action rifle she had picked up in a storage locker in the inverted-cross chamber on Deimos. It was easier for her to remember the most recent weapon she actually remembered using; I tried for a double-barreled shotgun, but I was still stuck with the damned Sig-Cow.

The spineys moved close enough that our own spiney corps could open fire from the sides with their piles of sharp rocks. The imps didn't know what to think! They hurled their snotballs for a while until they realized their attackers were other imps, immune to the fire, then the enemy broke and ran.

Arlene cleaned me up with a medical kit, also salvaged from the locker where she had found the rifle—same place we found uniforms (but no armor) to cover our nakedness right after the jump. Dodd was perfectly content to wander around starkers, once we got him a shotgun, but a red-faced Arlene
ordered him
to cover himself up. Evidently, the sight of her naked ex-lover, the one she had killed once, brought back too many horrific memories. Bad memories could be savage enemies in this place.

I was thinking about the Door, or lack of a Door. “I think just visualizing isn't enough. You have to have it really strong in your mind.”

“I did!”

“No, I mean like obsessing about it. You have to anticipate, salivate for it, visualize it some distance ahead of you and hold the thought in your mind as your life's goal all the way down there.”

She sat down beside me and put her arm over my shoulders, holding me like a frightened lover. “It's a pretty horrible thought, Flynn Taggart. Means we have to go deeper, doesn't it?”

“ 'Fraid so, A.S.”

Arlene nodded slowly. “Well, that's why they let us wear the Bird and Anchor. Okay, Fly, it's all starting to come back to me, now. I remember where the Door is.”

“Where is it?”

“It's three levels down. Remember that head-twisting open courtyard with all the freaking teleporters that zapped us to all the different rooms? Well, it's—it's in the room at the back of the courtyard with all the crushing pistons.”

I struggled to remember. In the intervening months (and thousands of monsters), it had all become a blur. But I thought I remembered what she was talking about. “Good deal, kiddo, just keep visualizing it. When we get there, we'll see it—I guarantee.”

I hoped I wouldn't have to eat those words, but the only thing that might do the trick now was
total assurance
on my part. Maybe it would be infectious.

Three levels down, we entered the courtyard. I decided we had better clear the central buildings first, which contained pumpkins, some spineys, and a hell prince—too much firepower to leave at our backs. With so many of us, virtually an army, we could use real tactics. Arlene volunteered to take point, which in this case meant she got to jump from teleporter to teleporter, until she found the one that dropped her in the center of the courtyard again, incidentally activating the door to one of the buildings.

She did it. When she appeared, she took one look into the eyes of a hell prince, squawked, and fell facedown in the dirt. Smart girl: we were all in ambush position, and we opened fire on the poor hell-spawn.

The minotaur never knew what hit it. Nine flaming snotballs, a machine gun, shotguns, and my own M-14 BAR—I'd found one at last!—and the hell prince staggered back against the rear wall of his building, unable even to muster up a lightning ball from his wrist launcher.

We repeated the process with the other three buildings, and when we finished, we had four empty bunkers and one very dizzy female Marine. I picked her up off the ground and held her under her arms, while we approached the chamber at the rear of the courtyard—that was where we both clearly remembered we would find the Door.

The front Door was locked. I was about to waste a few rounds when Slink stepped forward. “This one may?” she asked, and before I could answer, she shoved her iron fingers behind the latch, splintering the wood, and ripped the entire mechanism off the Door! The unbound wood swung slowly open, creaking like the cry of a banshee.

Inside were three zombies waiting for any visitors. Pfc. Dodd staggered forward, pushed past us, and entered the room. He strode up to his zombie brothers (two brothers and a sister) and began to “talk” in the swinelike grunts and moans of the recently undead.

The female zombie raised her rifle and fired a single shot. It hit Dodd in his mouth, taking out his entire lower jaw. We stared in shock for a moment. Arlene recovered faster than Yours Truly. She pumped the lever on her .45 rifle, firing six quick shots. Arlene killed all three zombies before the rest of us fired a shot. . . . She killed them before she even had an instant to think.

Then she dropped her gun and ran forward to Dodd, who was flopping disorientedly. She cradled the head and upper body of the rotting corpse in her lap, cooing to it softly. “I'm sorry,” she said. I don't
think she even realized the rest of us were there. “I'm sorry! I didn't mean to shoot you—I had to! Oh, please forgive me, I'm so, so sorry. . . .”

I knew who she was really apologizing to—the real Dodd was dead and long past caring. But Arlene was alive, and she needed forgiveness.

I don't know how it happened. Her memory of the original Dodd must have been strong. But just for a moment, the zombie Pfc. Dodd reached up and stroked Arlene's cheek! No zombie would have done that, I reckoned. A moment later he died. Again.

I turned away, leading the rest of the crew deeper into the building. Behind me, the crying lasted another couple of minutes, then it stopped as if cut off like a faucet. Arlene the lover was finally buried; Lance Corporal Sanders returned to the group and announced, “We'll find the Door behind the rear right piston. Careful not to get crushed.”

It was Arlene who found the Door, but Slink Slunk was more excited than the rest of us, for she recognized what it was. “Is bridge!” she cried, capering and gibbering, swinging her hands so violently that she tore a hole in one of the building walls. “Is bridge—connects other place!”

“The other place?” I asked.

Arlene sounded strangely detached, a stranger inhabiting the body of my buddy. “She's right, Fly, it is a bridge connecting us to main operating system of the
Disrespect.”

“How do you know that?”

Arlene smiled apologetically and shrugged. Her eyes were red from . . . from something she must have got in them. “ 'Cause I remember it. Of course.”

I approached. The Door looked like a bank vault, solid steel with a combination lock in the very center. The lock comprised eleven wheels, each lettered from A to Z with a space tag between last and first. The mechanics were obvious: line up the wheels so they
spelled out the password and turn the huge handle to open the Door. The only fly in the ointment was guessing the right sequence of letters.

So what's the big deal?
I wondered.
There can't be more than about 150 million billion combinations!
“Well,” I said, sighing. “I guess we'd better get busy. What should we try first?” I looked around, but nobody spoke. “Wait, I have something. Let's try this one.”

Smiling, I set the wheels to spell
P-A-S-S-W-O-R-D-Space-Space-Space-Space.
I turned the handle.

The Door clicked and opened.

I stood in the Doorway, staring like a total doofus. If there'd been a snake, it would have bit me; if there'd been a bear, it would have hugged me to death. A password spelled
PASSWORD?
That was the
stupidest
damned password I ever saw! When I was in the Applied Crypto Advanced Training Facility in Monterey, that was the standard joke among the students: the idiot who was
so
stupid that his password literally was that very word! But I had never believed until that moment that anyone could really be so—so braindead.

Evidently, it never even occurred to the Newbies that anyone would ever find one of their back Doors. I smiled. Every time I ran into these Resuscitators, they reminded me more and more of a bunch of
college
boys.

That made it easier. I could whup college boys.

We leveled weapons and slunk through the Door, Slink at my back while I took point, Arlene taking rear, everyone else in between: our standard formation. The Door led to a long corridor—I mean, a
long
corridor! Six klicks at least and arrow-straight the whole way.

At the end was another Door, just like the first, except this one had no combination lock. I opened the Door abruptly, prepared for the worst.

I wasn't prepared for what I saw. Staring at me was a seven-foot-tall, pearly black shell covered with millions upon millions of squirming vibrating cilia. It sat utterly still except for the cilia—a rounded blob without eyes, ears, or any other sensory organs.

We had found the answer, if only we knew what question to ask.

“A
bug . . . a
bug?
A huge freaking
bug,
that's what we're fighting?” Arlene was unhappy; I could tell. She stomped around the tiny cell, looking at the bug from all angles. It pretty much looked the same from every direction.

“I don't think it's an insect,” I rumbled.

“It's a bug! Who cares what kind?”

“Corporal, remember where we are.” I spoke sharply, and she hauled up, shutting her mouth. “What did we just pass through? What was that Doorway you remembered, A.S.?”