Endgame (7 page)

“Jesus,” she muttered. “Sergeant Fly, get your butt up here and eyeball this thing.”

“What is it?” I asked, trotting toward her position at port-arms.

“I'd rather you saw it for yourself without preconceptions.” She sounded tense and excited, and I double-timed the pace.

By the time I approached, I was panting. Jeez, what adding another stripe does to a Marine's physical fitness! Arlene didn't look tense; her RK-150 hung off her back totally casual. She was staring at something underneath the ship, where you'd have to crawl on your hands and knees to see it. She shone a pencil-light on the thing; it looked like a body of some sort, or was once . . . but definitely not a Fred.

“Hold my rifle,” I said, handing it to her. “I'm going under and take a look.”

She eyed the overhanging ship uneasily. “You sure this thing isn't going to roll over on you?”

“If'n it do, li'l lady,” I said, doing my Gunny Goforth imitation, “we-all gwan be inna heap'a troubles.”
The ship overhung us even where we stood, stretching a good fifty meters beyond us; if it chose to roll over, we'd be squashed like a bug on a bullet anyway, no matter where we stood.

But I sure didn't like crawling under the thing; I could feel the mass of immensity over my back; I got about ten meters in when I experienced a rush of utter, total panic. I'd never felt claustrophobic before! Why then? The ship felt like an upside-down mountain balanced on its peak, ready to topple over and crush me. I froze, unable to move, while waves of panic battered me. The only thing that kept me from turning around and crab-crawling back out of there was the fact that Arlene was staring at me, and I would rather die than have her think a sergeant in the Marine Corps was a screaming coward.

After a minute, the panic subsided into gripping anxiety; it was still horrible, but now bearable. “Are you all right?” Arlene called from behind me.

“Y-yeah, just trying to f-figure out what the thing is. Gotta git a lit . . . get a little closer.” I forced myself to crawl until I was as close as I could get. I set up my Sure Fire flashlight-lantern to illuminate the body while I inched forward until my head was caught between the spongy material and the ship's hull.

It was amazing, a scene straight out of
The Wizard of Oz:
when the Fred ship touched down, it landed right on top of a dead alien! It definitely wasn't a Fred; this creature looked more like an alien is supposed to look: white skin, long multiple articulated arms and legs, fingers like tendrils, not like the Freds' chopsticks or Sears and Roebuck's cilia. I swear to God, this thing actually had antennae, even. The eyes were huge, big as the cross-section on an F-99 Landing Flare, and Coca-Cola red; I couldn't quite see, but I think they continued around the back of the head. The face was turned toward me, and I got hot and cold chills running up and down my spine, like it was staring at me and demanding
why?
The mouth was a
red slit, and there was no nose—dark lines on the sides of the face, where the cheeks would be on a human, might have been air filters.

My heart started pounding again, another wave of panic; I was staring at my first Newbie—I just knew.

After I calmed down a bit, I slithered sideways, through my light; it was a bad moment when I eclipsed the light, casting the Newbie into total shadow. God only knew what it was doing in the dark. I got far enough to the side to see the body and legs. “You know,” I yelled back, my voice still shaky, “this thing doesn't look half bad. It's crushed a little, but I think it could be salvageable.”

Arlene yelled something back that I couldn't hear, then she got smart and spoke into her throat mike instead. “Can you drag it out if I throw you a rope?”

“I bet I can,” I responded. I was never a rodeo roper, but I'd been around a calf or two in my day. I grew up on a farm and worked the McDonald's Ranch when I was a kid. “Throw me the rope, A.S. I bet I can lasso that thing and drag it into the light of day. Kiddo, I think we may have gotten our first lucky break on this operation.”

W
e carried our gruesome trophy back into the ship, plopping it down on the table right behind Sears and Roebuck. When they turned, they stared, eyes almost popping out of their skulls. “What
that
is?”

“I was hoping you could tell us,” I grumbled. I had gotten used to Sears and Roebuck's galaxy-weary, we've-seen-everything-twice pose; I was even more shocked than the Magillas themselves at their confusion. “Are you saying this is an entirely new race of beings you've never seen before?”

“No,” they said, “and whatever disgusting is it is. The color is all wrong and the eyes are something horrible. Where did you get it?”

“Ship fell on it,” explained Arlene. “Could this be a Newbie, the race Rumplestiltskin was on about, the guys that wiped out the Freds?”

“Well something outwiped the Fred, that is sure,” said Sears and Roebuck. “If there no other life forms of life here, then is logically that is the Newbie.”

“Great, fine, cool,” I interrupted, “but can you revive the bloody thing?” I jabbed a meaty finger at them. “And
don't
hack off any arms or legs this time! You turned my stomach with what you did to Rumplestiltskin.”

Sears and Roebuck didn't answer. Instead, they grabbed an ultrasound and an X-ray and began mapping the gross anatomy of the Newbie. After half an hour of building up a reasonable 3-D model in the data stack, they dragged the heavy corpse into a ring that looked like it was made of bamboo—probably some sort of CAT scan or Kronke mapper that the Fred doctors used.

Arlene and I kicked back and talked about old sci-fi movies we had watched. She thought the creature looked like the aliens in
Communion
, but I held out for a giant-size version of the things from
E.T.
Finally, an hour and ten minutes into the examination, Sears and Roebuck suddenly answered, “Yes.”

It took me a moment to figure out they were answering my original question. “Say again? You're saying you
can
revive it?”

“We can revive them if the other half you find.”

“Other half? S and R, this thing was
alone
under there . . . that's all there is; it's not a double-entity like you.”

They stared at me for a few moments, but I'm not sure they really got it. Sears and Roebuck were Klave, and the Klave were always paired . . .
always
paired. Normally, they couldn't even deal with individuals—they literally couldn't see them! If you were alone, they would usually see a phantom second person; if you showed up as part of a triad—A, B, and C—the Klave would see three pairs: A and B, B and C, A and C . . . something we found out before Hidalgo bought it on the beam-in.

But Sears and Roebuck was—were?—an ambassador of sorts, and lately they'd gotten much practice coping with singles. Even so, sometimes they forgot.

They looked offended and pained. They lugged the corpse to the operating table and began the process of first figuring out what had “killed” the Newbie, then fixing it; that was all it took to revive anything in the galaxy . . . except a human being.

Sears and Roebuck spent a long time hunting for organic damage, finding nothing; at last, they announced the mystery solved: the Newbie had died of
malnutrition!
Evidently, it had been left behind accidentally and eventually ran out of dietary supplement pills. As its last action, it went and lay down right on the LZ, hoping to be found and revived, and that was what nearly got the thing scrunched flatter than an armadillo on a tank tread. Another few meters to one side, and splat!

Alas, that was a tough problem to cure. None of us had any idea how malnutrition affected Newbies. Sears and Roebuck did a biochemical analysis and thought they had isolated the essential nutrients. They compared them to what you could find on Fredworld, figuring out what was missing, then they had to guess what systems that would destroy.

The upshot was that Arlene and I were ordered to
take a hike for a day or two; we spent it exploring the ship, mapping all the “object-oriented” divisions of the ultraindividualist Freds. Strange, I never in my wildest nightmares thought I would be fighting alongside the ultimate collectivist Klave to defeat the ultraindividualist Freds! But a Marine is not there to make policy, just to enforce it.

We checked back frequently. I wouldn't put it past Sears and Roebuck to revive the Newbie without bothering to wait for me and Arlene. But at last they said they were ready. They had been washing various organlike objects in a nutrient bath, running a low-level electrical current through them for two days. Now they jump-started the hearts with big jolts of electricity, and the damned thing moaned, flapped its arms, and sat up—alive again, oo-rah.

The Newbie slowly stared at each of us, especially curious about Sears and Roebuck; it made no attempt to escape, attack, or even step off the operating table. I guess it figured we were unknown quantities—best not to rile us just yet.

The thing started picking up our language from the moment we revived it. I asked Arlene whether she had me covered, and the Newbie had all the vocabulary I used (Arlene, name; you, me, pronouns; covered, guarded with a gun) and half our language structure (interrogative, expression) down cold in six seconds. I started asking it simple questions; after the second or third one, it was answering in good English, a lot better than Sears and Roebuck had ever managed to learn. An hour after reviving, we were having an animated conversation!

“What is your name?” I asked.

“Newbies.”

Thanks a lump.
“Not you as a species, you as an individual. . . . What is
your
name?”

“Newbies.”

I shook my head. There was some sort of confusion, but maybe it was just the language. “All right,
Newbie, what did you do to the Freds, to the ones who were here before you?”

“They were broken, but we couldn't fix them.”

“How were they broken?”

The Newbie stared unanswering for a moment; I figured he was calculating the time factor. “Eleven decades elapsed between contacts by the Freds, and they had not grown to meet the circumstances. We expected to surrender and seek fixing, but they were broken and had to be fixed.”

“We found a Fred here who said you destroyed them, wiped them all off the face of the planet. Why did you kill him and his buddies?”

“What is a Fred?”

“A Fred! The Freds!” I waved my arms in exasperation. “Why did you kill them?”

“We are not familiar with a Fred. The Freds were broken; they did not grow to meet the circumstances. We attempted to fix them, but it was beyond our capabilities. We eliminated them from the mix while we studied the problem. The next time we encounter such a breakage, we shall have grown.”

The Newbie sat rigidly still on the operating table, arms hanging limply at its sides, almost as if they were barely usable.
Probably the result of being dead and imperfectly revivified,
I guessed. “Do you attempt to fix all races that don't, um, grow to meet the circumstances?”

“We have never encountered other races before. Until we grew, we did not realize we were a planet; we thought we were the world.”

“Why did the Newbies leave you behind?”

“We are the Newbies. We don't understand the question. We require further growth or fixing.”

“Why are you, you personally, still here on Fredworld? Why aren't you with the Newbies?”

“Your syntax is confusing us. We are here and we are there.”

Oh criminey! Another freaking hive culture.
The Klave were bad enough, being able only to see pairs and powers of two (pairs of pairs of pairs) . . . now these Newbies didn't even understand the concept of an individual member of a species.

“We must withdraw to consider your information,” I said. “Newbies, please wait on this table and elsewhere.”

“Newbies will wait.” The Newbie closed its eyes . . . and all life signs ceased! The machines giving their steady thuds with every beat of each heart (three—one in the groin area, one in the stomach, and a smaller one circulating blood through the head) fell silent, and a rasping buzz sounded as respiration and body temperature plunged.

I stared. Had something inside the Newbie's stomach moved? I leaned close, staring, then I thought about that grotesque movie from the late 1900s and the thing popping out of the chest, so I stepped back warily. But something inside the Newbie was definitely on the move; it rippled across the alien's belly from east to west, slithering around. “Sears and Roebuck,” I called, “did you pick up any large parasites or symbiotes that might be using the Newbie as a host?”

Sears and Roebuck looked at each other, hands on heads in agitation. “No,” they said, “definitely nothing there was that produces such a motion could produce.”

“Jesus, Fly, what's happening to it? It looks like it's being eaten alive! Is it dying?” Arlene and I split, stepping to either side of the Newbie, weapons at the ready. The snake or worm or whatever it was pressed up against the Newbie's stomach, bulging out the flesh; Arlene and I backed up a step, thank God—when the belly burst, blue-gray Newbie blood or fluid sprayed across the sickbay, splashing the wall and even spotting my uniform slightly.

A gray serpent slithered through the opening . . . but the true horror was that the serpent had
six heads!
Then I blinked, and the scene abruptly changed: it wasn't a six-headed serpent; it was a tentacle with six prongs, or “fingers,” at the end. It lashed about uncontrolled for a few minutes, falling limp at last.

The Newbie opened his eyes. “Are you finished considering our information?” He seemed not at all perturbed by the new addition to his anatomy; in fact, he didn't even remark on it.