Endgame (6 page)

S
ears and Roebuck began yanking their heads back and forth again, expressing some sort of emotion only a Klave could understand. “What are you on about?” I demanded, still stewing about the missing Newbies.

“We have faxed the injuns,” declared our compatriot. “To where would like you to go?”

Another hour had passed, and neither Arlene nor I had gotten another intelligible word out of Rumplestiltskin.
“What do you think?” I asked Arlene. “Has he fulfilled his part of the bargain?”

She pursed her lips. “I can't think of anything else to ask. We've hit a brick wall in every direction now.” Arlene inhaled deeply, then swallowed a nutrient pill. “Yeah, Fly, I guess he's done what he agreed. You going to burn him?”

I shrugged. “I promised—deal's a deal.”

Gingerly, I reached across and pulled all the connections from the torso of the Fred. I looked across at Sears and Roebuck, but they had completely lost interest, their long arms reaching all around the Fred navigational unit, the one in this district of the ship, and disconnecting and reconnecting fiber-optic cables. “You, ah, know where there's a Fred ray?”

The Fred ray was the last-ditch weapon that they used against us when we rampaged through their base, and later their ship; it was some sort of particle beam weapon, much better than ours. Arlene had inventoried the weapons on the Fred ship, including seventy-four Fred rays; she took me to the nearest one, leaving me to drag the torso behind.

Turning my head away, praying to avoid vomiting and completely humiliating myself in front of my friend and subordinate, I balanced the torso on a neutron-repellant backdrop, the only thing that would stop the beam. The body fell over, and I set it up again. Then I stepped back and cranked the weapon around to point at the Fred's chest, where it stored its brain.

“Man, I don't like doing this,” I muttered.

“Fly, he's been trapped dead underneath that rubble outside for forty years. One eye was open—remember?”

“So?”

“So for four decades, Sergeant, Rumplestiltskin stared unblinking at the ground or the sky or the sun, knowing his entire species had been wiped out in the wink of an eye by an alien race they were going to
enslave. Fly, he's suffered enough; don't trap him inside that corporeal bottle.”

My hands started shaking as I inserted a jerry-rigged pair of chopsticks into the holes to press the levers, simulating a Fred hand.

Arlene put her hand on my shoulder. “You want I should do it?”

I shook my head firmly. “No, A.S., didn't you read
Old Yeller
when you were a little girl?”

“No, I was too busy reading
Voyage to the Mushroom Planet
and
The Star Beast.”

“When your dog has to die, Arlene, you've got to shoot him yourself. You can't get someone else to shoot Old Yeller for you.”

I pressed the lever, completing the connection. As usual, we saw nothing. That was the part that bothered me the most: as destructive as this neutron beam was, you'd think you would see something, for God's sake! A blue light, a lightning bolt, fire and brimstone—
something.
But the beam was as invisible as X-rays in the dentist's office, and as quiet; all I heard was a single click, and suddenly there was a huge hole through Rumplestiltskin's chest. Within three or four seconds, its body was boiling, the flesh vaporizing instantly wherever the beam touched.

I slowly burned away the entire torso. The Fred ray was a gigantic eraser—everywhere I pointed, flesh simply vanished. A minute after turning on the beam, I clicked it off; nothing remained of the Fred but an invisible mist of organic molecules in a hot ionized plasma state. My guess was the interrogation was pretty permanently over.

“Okay, kiddo,” I said to A.S.; “let's go Newbie hunting.”

We suited up for combat, and for the first time in God knows how long, I found myself getting the shakes. Somehow, I'd thought the Freds would have burned all the fear out of me, leaving nothing but a cold husk of sociopathy. Not true. At the thought of
going up against whatever it was that plowed the Freds into the dirt on their own home turf, my hands trembled so much I couldn't even StiKro my boots on tight.

“Stay here and keep the engine running,” I told Sears and Roebuck.

“You want to start me the engines?” they asked, confused.

“Just a figure of speech, you dufoids,” Arlene explained. “But run through the launch sequence up to just before engine start. . . . We may have to book if we stumble onto a whole nest of them.”

Sears and Roebuck looked at each other, Alley Oop and his mirror image; they seemed perfectly content staying aboard the ship and letting the Marines do the dirty work. I sealed up the helmet and pressed the other armor seals tight; it wasn't a pressure suit, but in a pinch, we could survive a few minutes in hard vacuum. I noticed Arlene's face was whiter than its usual English pale; she must have figured the odds the same as I.

My breath sounded loud in my ears as we edged down the gangway onto the surface of Fredworld again. The landscape looked eerily alive through the night-vis flipdowns, tinted green but combining infrared, radio emission, and visible light enhancement. I turned slowly with a microwave motion detector; nothing moved around us, unless it was over the jagged mountains on the horizon.

“This isn't good,” I said over a shielded, encrypted channel to Arlene. “Shouldn't there be
some
life, even if the Newbies killed all the Freds?”

“Maybe they couldn't tell which were Freds and which were animals, so they fragged everything. Maybe they used a nuclear bomb, or some kind of poison or a biovector.”

I grunted. “Doesn't seem likely that they'd manage to get absolutely every living thing, does it?”

“There's another possibility, Fly: maybe there are living animals, but they're just not moving.”

“Animal
means
moving, Arlene, like animated.” She didn't answer, so I started a spiral sweep, mainly watching the outer perimeter. After three hours of recon, I was starting to regret being so nice and burning Rumplestiltskin's mortal coil, setting free his soul. “If that bastard lied to me—”

“You'll what?” came Arlene's radio voice in my ear. “Resurrect him and kill him again?”

“Maybe we should resurrect the Freds on the ship. Whoops, don't correct me; I just figured out how stupid that suggestion was.” I managed to catch her while she was inhaling, or else she would have quickly snorted that the Freds on the ship knew even less about the Newbies than we—we had already killed them before we left for Fredworld, a hundred and sixty years before the Newbies landed!

The weirdness of the place was starting to get to me. I kept seeing ghosts in my peripheral vision, but there was nothing when I whipped around with the motion detector. “Damn that Rumplestiltskin! He swore they were still here!”

“Maybe he just meant they were here when he died?”

I paused a long time. “Arlene, if that's all he meant, then we're in deep, deep trouble. I don't think you realize how deep.”

“I don't get you. If we can't find them, we jump back in the ship and return to—to Earth.” She didn't say it, but I knew she was thinking
to a dead, loveless Earth with no Albert Gallatin.

“A.S., if we don't find the Newbies, I can almost guarantee they're going to find
us.
They'll find Earth. We were almost wiped out by the Freds. We barely hung on, and only because we evolved so much faster than they, we were so much more flexible—because they underestimated us! What the hell do you think
would happen to humanity if the Newbies found us next?”

“Jesus. I didn't think—”

“And if they can go from stone plows and oxen to—to
this
in just two hundred years, where are they going to be just ten years from now? What if they don't find us for fifty years, or a hundred years? Jesus and Mary, Arlene; they would be gods.”

She was silent; I heard only my own breath. I almost considered asking her to switch to hot-mike, so I could hear her breathing as well, but I couldn't afford to lose control now, not when I had troops depending on me. Above all else, I had to demonstrate competence and confidence.

“Fly,” she said at last, “I don't like this. I'm getting scared.” She wrapped her arms around her chest and shivered, as if feeling a chill wind or someone walking across her grave.

“Maybe we can pick up some trace from orbit.”

“After
forty years?”

“Maybe Sears and Roebuck has some idea.” Yeah, right. Sears and Roebuck never even
heard
of the Newbies until just now, and if they had that hard a time understanding us and our evolutionary rate—Jeez, how could they even imagine the Newbies and what they might mutate into? “Let's head back,” I decided. “We're not doing anything out here but scaring the pants off of each other.”

Arlene nodded gravely. “Kinky,” she judged.

I heard a strange, faint buzz in my earpiece as we headed back toward the ship . . . sounds, voices almost. I could nearly believe they were whispers from the Fred ghosts, desperately trying to communicate—perhaps still fighting the final battle that had destroyed them. I was now convinced that there was not a single artichoke-headed Fred left intact on that planet, except for the corpses we brought with us—corpses we would never revive. In fact, I decided to leave them behind on Fredworld; the temptation to
wake the dead, just for someone to talk to, might be too great, overwhelming our common sense and self-preservation.

But the notion of ghosts wasn't that far-fetched. Since their spirits never died, where did they go? I began to feel little stabs of cold on the back of my neck, icy fingers poking and prodding me.
Jesus, shut off that imagination!
I commanded myself.

“Huh?” Arlene asked, jumping guiltily. “Criminey, Fly, are you a mind reader now?”

I said nothing . . . hadn't even been aware I spoke that last thought aloud; curious coincidence that it turned out to be perfectly appropriate.

The ship was so huge that it was hard to recognize it as mobile; it looked like an artificial mountain, three-eighths of a kilometer high, over a hundred stories—taller than the Hyundai Building in Nuevo Angeles—and stretching to the vanishing point in either direction. The landing pad was barely larger than the footprint of the ship, clearly built to order. Weird markings surrounded the LZ, the landing zone, burned into the glass-hard surface by an etching laser, either landing instructions or ritual hieroglyphs. They looked like they once had been pictograms, now stylized beyond recognition.

“You know, Fly, we've never actually walked all the way around this puppy.”

“I know. I've been avoiding it. I don't like thinking of how big this damned ship really is.”

Arlene sounded pensive, even through the radio. “Honey, Sergeant, I've had this burning feeling—”

“Try penicillin.”

“I've had this burning feeling that we have to walk this path, walk all the way around what's going to be our world for the next nine weeks, or however long it takes until we finally get . . . home.”

I stared back and forth between the obsidian LZ and the ship door, torn. “You're right.” I sighed. “We ought to reconnoiter. Arlene, take point.”

“Aye-aye, Skipper,” she said, voice containing an odd mixture of elation and anxiety. She unslung her RK-150, and I flexed my grip on the old, reliable standard, the Marine-issue M-14, which contrary to the designator was more like an updated Browning automatic rifle than the Micronics series of M-7, -8, -10, and -12. These were heavy-lifting small arms, and the Freds were pretty pathetic when not surrounded by their “demonic” war machines. I don't know what we expected to run into on Fredworld; nothing good, I suspected.

I thought about calling Sears and Roebuck and telling them what we were doing, but we were right outside. If they wanted us, they could call their own damned selves. Still feeling that chill on the nape of my neck, I followed Arlene at a safe twenty-five meters.

It was hard not to be awestruck next to that ship. It was hard to credit; the Freds could do
this,
and they couldn't even conquer a low-tech race like humanity! They always taught us at Parris Island that heart and morale mattered more than tanks and air support in combat: look at the Mujahadeen in Afghanistan and Bosnia, at the Scythe of Glory in Kefiristan. But this was the first time I really believed that line: we really wanted the fight, and the Freds were unprepared for resistance.

The ship was gunmetal gray along most of its flank, except where micrometeorites had scored the surface or punctured it. Thank God for self-sealing architecture; at the speeds we traversed the galaxy, cosmic dust sprayed through the ship like bullets through cheese.

We reached the aft end and stared up at the single, staggeringly huge thruster. The ship was a ramjet, according to the specs: as it moved at increasing velocity relative to the interstellar hydrogen, an electromagnetic net spread out in front of the boat, scooping up protons and alpha particles and funneling
them into the “jets,” where the heat from direct conversion of matter to energy turned the hydrogen into a stream of plasma out the ass-end. No other way could we accelerate so near the speed of light in only three or four days.

The thruster at the back looked exactly like a standpipe. I kid you not; I caught myself looking for the faucet that would turn on the water. We rounded the stern and headed for'ard again.

About a kilometer from the stern, we found it—we found our first, and only, Newbie body. Arlene saw something and jogged forward; I dropped to one knee and covered her, watching her through my snap-up rifle scope. She ran under the ship, finally having to crouch and skitter sideways for the last couple score meters; this close to the ship, the underside looked like a building overhang where it rose away from the cup-shaped LZ.