Endgame (4 page)

“Okay, I get it. Well, joke or not, we didn't like it, and the Freds are going to find out just how
much
we didn't like it when that cargo door begins to grind open.”

Four days before landing, the Fred ship began its automatic deceleration; all of a sudden, we had more than a full Earth gravity for'ard, once again giving us a weird, double-heavy vector toward the outer corner of the room. Arlene did some calculations and figured that the ship was actually accelerating at about
ninety-six
g's—that's what it took to decelerate from our velocity relative to Fredworld to match orbit in four days! So there must have been the mother of all inertial damping fields to dissipate that force in the form of heat around the ship. We would probably have appeared star-white to an infrared viewer—a big blazing flare warning the Fred of our imminent arrival, in case they'd forgotten.

All good things must come to an end. The night before we were to land, when we still had not been hailed or attacked en route by the Freds, Arlene spent the night nestled in my arms. It wasn't the first time we had spent the night in the same bunk, stripped to our skivvies; some people in Fox Company had never believed us that we never had sex—but it's true. I loved her too much to push for something that she would probably give me, even though she didn't want to, just out of friendship. But that never stopped us from cuddling up when crap got too scary, or when one of us was hurting from a failed
affaire du coeur.

We held each other tight the night before landing, Arlene's beautiful high-and-tight pressed hard against my blue-shaven chin, as Corps as we could possibly be for our last day—but still needing the warmth of that
one human who made it all worthwhile, even the end. And believe it or not, we actually slept well: we had no doubts or nagging fears because we
knew
we were going out in a blaze of Marine Corps glory the next morning!

Tomorrow came, and Fredworld loomed before us on the for'ard TV monitor. Assuming no color correction, it was mostly brown with straight black lines crisscrossing it at odd angles, with no visible continents, water, or weather, but tons of gunk orbiting around it, sparkling in the sunlight every now and again. Jagged red streaks might indicate intense volcanic activity. . . . “Oh joy,” I said when Arlene suggested the possibility.

“We should stay on aboard the ship,” said Sears and Roebuck, as if we had rehearsed anything but for the last eight weeks.

“Strap down,” I commanded. “The atmosphere is getting thick enough to measure. We might be in for some heavy buffeting, according to the timeline.”

The Fred computer was no liar. We were shaken around something fierce, and I got seasick almost immediately. I didn't blow, but I sure felt as green as Sears and Roebuck looked. Even Arlene wasn't comfortable, and she
never
gets motion sick.

We hadn't bothered to strap down the captain's body, and he was bounced right out of his chair. Oh well, I sure as hell wasn't about to unstrap to go fetch him. His corpse bucked around the bridge, dropping artichoke leaves in its wake as if leaving a trail for us to follow. I hoped he “felt” every blow, the worthless bastard, however dead aliens “feel” anything!

All of a sudden, I heard God's own crash of trumpets and drums, and the ship wrenched so abruptly, so violently, that I think I passed out; I blinked back to awareness sometime later—don't know how long—and immediately felt a head-splitting agony, like some Fred or Fred monster was repeatedly jamming its claw into my skull! The searing
pain lasted only four or five seconds, then it was gone, but it was another few heartbeats before color rushed back into my vision. I hadn't even realized I was seeing in black and white until the view colorized again.

Every muscle in my body ached, like two mornings after the world's toughest workout. My stomach lurched; we were at zero-g again.
What the hell?
I looked to my side, where I could just see a portal: the planet loomed below us, barely moving, drifting slowly up to greet us. I didn't hear the engines humming. Were we in freefall? What gave?

Arlene and Sears and Roebuck started thrashing around, finally coming around to consciousness again. I had no idea what had happened or how we appeared to be landing without engines—the only ones who might have known were the Klave, and they weren't talking. Arlene started looking around, coming to the same conclusions I had a couple of minutes earlier; we looked questions at each other, then I shrugged and she narrowed her eyes. I didn't care, so long as we made dirtside—but Arlene would stew over how we had landed for days and days until she figured it out, unless Sears and Roebuck decided to get a whole hell of a lot more garrulous than they had been to date. Unless her serene contemplation were cut short by Fred rays and machine guns.

For the moment, at least—a long moment—we ran silently and at peace, probably our last moment of calm before the firestorm of combat. Then, with a groaning thump that sounded as if the entire Fred ship were tearing in half along the major axis, we jerked to a stop on some sort of runway. We had arrived on Fredworld, shaken but not stirred.

Quickly, I got my troops unstrapped, and we hustled along to our stations, just in case the Fred fooled us by cutting their way inside without waiting for the doors to open. Nothing happened, and we waited out the landing sequencer. Then, seventy-five minutes
after landing and right on schedule, the cargo door began to roll open, excruciatingly slowly, making a noise like all the Fred monsters in the world screaming in unison. We braced for the impact of the first shock troops.

We waited; we waited; nothing came; nothing pounded, rattled, or thumped up the gangway. We sat alone, each in our assigned spots, ready for action that never came, the war never fought.

I held my breath as long as I could. Then, about fifteen after we should have seen the first swarms of Freds up the gangway, overrunning our first “defensive” position (designed to be overridden, I add), I clenched my teeth to activate my throat mike and clicked to Arlene:
click, click-click, click, click . . .
Marine code for “nothing this end how's by you?”

The tiny lozenge-size receiver in my ear told me what I was afraid of hearing:
click, click-click.
Nothing her end, either. Sears and Roebuck didn't have a mike or receiver, but they were with Arlene.

I waited another fifteen minutes, querying every two minutes; Arlene responded every time with the same combination:
click, click-click. Or
is
it Arlene?
I thought with sudden trepidation. I visualized the monsters overwhelming her before she could signal engagement or fire a shot, subduing her or even . . . killing her. Behind my eyes, I saw a scaly fungoid finger clicking on the mike, repeating the all-clear over and over.

I gave with a rapid-fire series of clicks, running through nearly half the Marine Corps signal code. Almost immediately, my correspondent responded with the
other
half—either it was really Lance Corporal Arlene Sanders or one hell of a smart Fred captain.

My muscles started to cramp. I stood cautiously, keeping an ear cocked and an eye trained on the gangway. After stretching, I returned to my position: many an ambush has been blown by impatience. But after an hour of plenty of nothing, even my patience
was exhausted. If I knew they were coming, just late, I could have waited a week! But more and more, it began to look like we'd been had.

“End operation gather at final rendezvous spot,” I clicked to my corporal. Ten minutes of quick walking later, we all met in the engine room. Arlene stared at me as if it were all my fault; she kept clenching and relaxing her gun hand, rubbing her fingers against her thumb like she were trying to start a fire the hard way.

“Okay, buddy-boy Sergeant dude, what gives?”

I shrugged. “There's no boarding party.”

“Gee, you
think
so?” If sarcasm could drip, I had just had a puddle of it dribbled onto my shoes.

I scratched my chin; it was already starting to get rough. In another few hours, I'd have to shave again. Funny, I thought the last time was the
last
time I'd ever have to do that. “You, ah, want to recon?”

Arlene turned to look back over her shoulder, as if she'd heard a noise. I didn't hear anything. “Recon?”

“Yeah, recon: that's when you go outside and—”

“I guess we'd better; we're never going to sleep again if we don't.”

I turned to Sears and Roebuck, but they were shaking so hard they were blurry. “We'll stay here,” they said. “We'll be out right. We'll follow you in later time. We'll stay here until you come back. But we'll follow you in later time.”

I was a little shocked when I realized that
they were speaking separately!
I had never seen such a thing before among the Klave, never even knew it was physically possible! I guess that was their equivalent of multiple-personality disorder, or in this case, a feedback loop—they could neither advance nor fail to advance. I expected smoke to come out their ears at any moment, but they disapointed me.

Arlene and I found the emergency engine-room access panel and laboriously hand-cranked it open, then we dropped lightly through, landing with a crunch on Fredworld.

A
s predicted by the timeline program, the ground and air were quite hot and
very
humid, but we didn't sink into lava or inhale a lungful of hydrogen cyanide. The ship, which evidently had no name, just a number, was so monstrous it looked like that shopping mall in Tucson—used to be in Tucson—that advertised as the world's largest, until the Fred bomb. The beast that had carried us a couple hundred light-years hulked high above our heads, stretching on out of sight in a generally sunward direction, shielding us from the terrific heat.

Sideways past the ship were a series of squarish buildings seemingly built on something soft that had collapsed; they all leaned, one way or another, at crazy angles like the Leaning Tower of Pisa. The whole arrangement looked like a demented version of an Earth spaceport. In the other direction was a monstrous condo complex erected roughly like a human graveyard, like headstones arranged in concentric circles. The reddish sky added to the “charm” of Fredworld, its ground that glowed in spots, covered with eight centimeters of black ash.

There was not a single artichoke-head to be seen. A spongy walkway encircled the ship's berth; we cautiously moved onto it, expecting the Fred to come screaming out of the buildings at any moment and fully prepared to instantly retreat to our defensive positions aboard the ship.

For the next eleven hours we searched that damned
compound—nearly two thirds of an eighteen-hour Fred day. We found sludge from decomposing leaves littering half the buildings; either they liked walking through sludge or a bunch of Fred were slain so suddenly that no one had time to sweep the place. But then, where were the corpses? “I'm getting a real bad feeling about this,” I muttered to Arlene.

She said nothing, just tugged on my body armor and pointed back at the ship: after eleven hours, Sears and Roebuck were finally poking their noses out, sniffing the winds to figure out why they were still alive. I was so beat, I didn't even go over and tell them.
Let 'em figure it out on their own,
I angrily decided! I'd been on my feet forever, and I wasn't in the mood to deal with them. Arlene was bad enough.

As soon as it became obvious there were no Freds anywhere around—hence, probably very few Freds, if any, on the whole planet, else they would have stormed our ship, even if they had to send for troops—Arlene reslung her weapon-of-choice, a twelve-gauge, semi-auto riot gun made by Krupp-Remington, the RK-150, with 150-round drum magazine. She set off in a spiral search pattern to see if she could figure out what the hell happened.

I stood in the shade, panting in the burning heat. Fredworld, at least this part of it, was hot as Hell, 54.5 degrees centigrade according to my wrist-therm. Sweat poured down my face; the perspiration didn't evaporate in that humidity, especially not under a helmet. I wished I had a standard-issue pressure suit with air conditioning; but we hadn't made any plans to stowaway aboard a Fred ship, so we didn't think to bring them along. Space suits we had, courtesy of Sears and Roebuck, but they didn't help with planetary temperature (I asked).

Sears and Roebuck cautiously approached. As usual, they didn't seem the least affected by the heat or anything else. They peered around anxiously. “Are they all dead?” they asked.

I shrugged. “Dead or gone. I don't see any bodies. Sanders is doing a sweep. We'll see what she says.”

I poked around a little. What I thought was a condo complex turned out to be a series of interconnected buildings, like the Pueblo Indians used to build in caves up a cliff, but these were built into the natural hollows formed by cracks in the ground. I saw what might have been molded furniture, but nothing of a personal nature. Of course, we didn't have a freaking clue what, if anything, a Fred would consider personal. The buildings were bleached white, like all the color was burned out of them, leaving a pockmarked surface like pumice.

Arlene's voice jumped at me through my ear receiver. “Fly, I think you'd better come over here. I've got a live one.”

“Live?” I asked, flipping up my dish antenna and homing in on her signal—standard armor-issue, very useful.

“Oops, I mean a fresh dead body—maybe we can fix it and revive the bastard, figure out what blew through.”

“What? What?” demanded Sears and Roebuck, obviously hearing only my end of the conversation.

“Come on, boys,” I said, setting off at a trot, “need your magic over here.”

I jogged across the compound, turning as necessary to keep the beeps loud and fast. I found Arlene in two minutes, just half a klick distant as the Fly flies. She was crouching over a collapse of pumice stone, out of which stuck one part of a Fred hand and foot. Evidently, it had been unlucky enough to be caught in a building when it fell, thus not getting out in time to be disintegrated or kidnapped or whatever happened to the rest.