Knee-Deep in the Dead

by Dafydd ab Hugh

  But the floating head hadn’t been in Arlene’s face; she was still in control. The red ball floated around the corner, and she let it have a blast from behind.

  It rebounded from the blast, roaring in pain, then slowly turned to face her. While it did, I caught hold of myself.

  I blasted the floating pumpkin from my angle. As it turned back to me, Arlene skated to the side and blasted it again.

  Now we both knew what to do. We dropped naturally into a standard Light Drop tactic—move, fire, move again, fire again. The ball did a lot of bouncing. Whatever life force kept it going hadn’t left it yet. But we kept firing.

  Then it died the messiest monster death I had seen so far. One moment the ball was bouncing against the walls; the next, there came a spray of sticky, blue goo that smelled like caramelized pumpkin pie and sounded like an overripe squash dropped ten stories. I seriously considered losing the lunch I had struggled so hard to ingest.

  “Oo-rah!” exulted Arlene. “Smashing pumpkins into small pieces of putrid debris! What the hell was that?”

  “Um. I was going to ask you the same question.”

  I couldn’t take my eyes off the disgusting, deflated remains. We should have been expecting brand new monsters, but this floating beach-ball thing was so weird, it meant anything was possible.

  That scared the hell out of me. It meant we might run into something indestructible, or at least unkillable.

  “What, ah, do you want to call this one?” Arlene asked.

  I’d forgotten our little game. It was a good question, but my mind was blank. “Call it a pumpkin,” I suggested at last.

  Arlene wasn’t impressed. She wrinkled her nose as if smelling limburger cheese. “I didn’t mean that as a serious name, Fly. We need something more . . . frightening.”

  “All right, then, you name it.”

  “No dice, Fly. First person who sees a monster has to name it. That’s the rule.”

  I was about to demand to know why she got to make the rules; I stifled myself in time. Of course she made the rules—she was the female.

  “Then it’s a pumpkin, Arlene.” I put my foot down. Maybe I’ll get lucky and she’ll dislike my name enough that the rule will change.

  We secured the corridor. It was monster-free. It wasn’t ooze-free, but the stuff didn’t look deep until pretty far along. Ahead lay a small ocean of the stuff with an exit at the other end.

  “Best way to get through shallow goo is jogging,” she said. “Eats away your boots, but you last longer.”

  “Sure beats swimming in it,” I agreed.

  “Don’t be silly. That would kill you.”

  I made a mental note to brag to Arlene about my swim.

  I searched the immediate vicinity for any life-giving blue spheres, but we were alone in the sea of green. “So what does your computer map say?”

  Arlene zoomed the room we were in, and we noticed a couple of switches and a teleporter.

  We threw the first switch, and stairs slid into view like shark fins rising from a tranquil sea. We hoofed it to the next switch, then went straight to the teleporter. We did not pass GO, we did not collect 200 monsters.

  “My turn to go first,” she declared; I knew better than to argue.

  “I’ll count to thirty.”

  Her trim form faded from view, and I started the count. “ . . . Twenty-eight, twenty-nine, thirty.”

  Weapon up, I followed, ready for almost anything—except what I actually saw: a whole bank of shiny, new, undamaged radios! “Bank is open,” said Arlene.

  “I guess they missed this room,” I said, checking the corners for possible ambush. There was nowhere to hide, and we seemed to be alone; but I didn’t let down my guard. The invisible ghosts were reason enough not to completely trust the old eyeballs.

  Arlene fired up one of the radios then whooped for joy when it hummed and came on-line. But no matter what frequency she typed, we heard nothing but crashing-ocean static.

  Arlene took her time, running carefully by five megahertz jumps up the entire spectrum; then she tried the same procedure with different radios. The results were the same.

  “Fly, this doesn’t make sense,” she said finally.

  “They couldn’t be blocking the signal somehow?” I asked.

  “These antennas stick half a kilometer off the surface of Deimos! Whatever’s blanking the signal must be enveloping the entire moon.”

  Time to put on the thinking cap. I even paced. “Arlene,” I said at last, “every radio I came across on Phobos was smashed.”

  “Same with me.”

  “Now here is a vitally important communications room that they couldn’t possibly miss . . .”

  “You’re assuming an intelligent enemy here,” she said.

  “There has to be, Arlene! Phobos and Deimos are part of the same invasion. Why leave this room intact, but not the ones on Phobos?”

  “Fly, Deimos was abandoned four years ago. I was present when the Marines picked up everything and left. Budget cuts, reduction in force, and a lack of tactical imagination sent us packing.”

  I nodded, sitting on the floor with my back to the wall, at an angle where I had an unobstructed view of the door. “A big mistake,” I said.

  She was on a roll: “What if the aliens invaded back then? Or some time ago—weeks, months, or longer. They could take their time spreading through the facility . . . and there’d be no reason to smash the radios here on alien-controlled Deimos.”

  We listened to the symphony of white noise. “So why can’t we reach anyone now, Arlene?”

  When enough crazy stuff happens all at once, the imagination is free to float off like that damned pumpkin. I didn’t know if it was inspiration or not, but I asked the trillion-dollar question: “Maybe Deimos is no longer in orbit around Mars?”

  I was so used to the way she liked to watch me through slitted eyes that when she stared at me wide-eyed, she looked like a different person. “I never thought of that,” she said. “It would explain Deimos vanishing from the screens. I just assumed it was destroyed somehow.”

  Having started down the twisting path, I ran to keep up. “You said Deimos is so small that gravitational effects are negligible. It’s more like a giant spaceship than a planet.”

  We stared at each other. Inspiration can be catching. “But how do you remove an entire moon instantaneously,” she mused, “even one as small as Deimos?”

  I don’t spend all my time on target practice and working out; sometimes I read. “By shifting it into a different dimension?”

  She smiled. “Fly, you’ve been watching too many sci-fi trideos.”

  “I don’t know about that, A.S.; but special F/X will never be convincing again after facing the real thing.”

  “What makes you think we’ll ever see another movie?” Neither of us spoke for a bit; then Arlene continued.

  “So suppose they’ve turned Deimos into a giant spaceship,” she said. “Where would they be taking us? Back to their home world?”

  “With us as prime specimens?” I said, not feeling the least bit comfortable about the idea. “Whatever the destination, I’ve got a bad feeling about this.”

  “Any destination is probably bad for us,” she agreed.

  “We could be in some kind of artificial wormhole on the way to hell.”

  “As if this weren’t hell already! Besides, I’m not religious, Fly; I didn’t go to any parochial school.”

  My mind’s eye conjured up old images from the Chapel of Mary and Martha. Sister Lucrezia, who taught us Dante’s Inferno, acted as if she’d just returned from a special tourist-class trip through the infernal regions and couldn’t wait to share her Bad News for Modern Man. One July weekend at Saint Malachi Summer Camp, I saw her in full regalia, standing up in a rowboat and pushing off from the dock with a long oar. I thought I’d seen a vision of Charon the Boatman, ferrying lost souls across the River Styx. I doubt any monster here could beat her out for the job.

  I
was half convinced I was already on a one-way trip to the real place. But the idea that Arlene was coming along drove me mad with anger. I wasn’t about to let one stinking demon-claw touch that noble soul of hers.

  Arlene stood up from the useless radios. “I’ve been trying to get a fix on the enemy, some handle; but all I’m doing is drawing blanks. I’ve had the experience of running down corridors before,” she confided, “with dozens of armed men out for my blood. Sometimes your best chance for survival is to go right into the rooms and corridors they hold and destroy whatever they came for. We made our way into the embassy vault and burned all our important documents . . . and the KPLA left. You know what I’m talking about?”

  “I’m glad you got out of there, A.S. It was a real hellhole.”

  “Yeah, I wouldn’t miss this hell pit for the world.”

  I stared at the radios myself. Yep . . . that’s a radio, all right, I thought, which is about as far as my education in electronic communications gear went.

  Why on Earth—on Deimos—would the Corps give up such a strategic position as this station? By Executive Order number whatever, the Marines had military jurisdiction on all extraterrestrial planetary surfaces; the Navy had deep space; the Air Force had atmospheric; and the Army had Earth itself.

  Mars, Phobos, and Deimos were surely ours to the bone. The only reason I could imagine us giving it up was if the other services conspired to cut our space-ops budget . . . with pretty disastrous consequences. Wonder if anybody felt shame about that, or would if we lived to tell anyone?

  “Round of ammo for your thoughts,” she said.

  “Nothing important. Politics back on the old home planet.”

  “At least there’s no politics here. Unless you count that swastika.”

  “You saw it, too?” I was beginning to wonder if I’d dreamed that damned crooked cross. “That’s not politics; it’s a bad joke.”

  “You think they put it there to scare us, huh? The way they—what do you call it? rework—the physical buildings gives me the creeps.”

  “Nothing from Earth scares me after what I’ve seen, Arlene. What’s next, a hammer and sickle?”

  “A what?”

  “Never mind. You’re too young to remember. I’ll make you a bet that we don’t find any other symbols from the home planet.”

  We shook hands. “You’ll lose,” she said. “You are thinking too much about politics. I win if we find any symbols, including religious symbols . . . and there’ve been plenty enough of those.”

  “Damn, you’re right. I lose. All the Satan stuff.”

  She could sound like a professor when she wanted to: “Maybe the demons—the aliens—were confused by Hollywood into thinking the swastika is a satanic symbol. It sure seems suspiciously like somebody had an official list of Things that Scare Westerners . . . like they knew it would be seen by UAC workers and Marines, not by Native American Indians or Japanese. Wonder if they’d change the symbols for different humans, say using the letters kyo or oni if they were invading the Nippon Electric space station?

  “In any case, the religious symbols are terrestrial, so you lose, Corporal.”

  Now it was my turn to grin. “Well, Arlene, if you are going to lose a bet, it’s good to find out before you set the amount.” She gave me a playful punch in the shoulder. We started out while I massaged the numbness out of my arm. At the next inverted cross we passed, I’d pay anything she wanted. Within reason.

  20

  The video map showed us how to get to the central elevator for all of the Deimos installation. We were very near. All that separated us from our goal was a wall.

  The wall had a switch, a full-body bas relief of a cloven-hoofed alien. And it wasn’t his tongue that required flicking.

  My face flushed. “Um, you’d better take this one, PFC Sanders.

  “And here I thought you were a born lever-puller.” Arlene flicked the switch; the blue-gray wall cranked down into a slit in the floor, revealing a spacious lift. “Deluxe service,” Arlene said, pointing at the labeled bank of elevator buttons. We’d made it through the Containment Area. Below us was the Refinery, then Deimos Lab, the Command Center, the Central Hall, and three levels below that which were unlabeled.

  “Basement? Skip the crap?” I said.

  “Hm. Yeah, well, maybe.”

  “Maybe? Makes sense to me. Every time that door slides open, we run the risk of being stormed by giant vampire slugs from the planet Pomos, or being machine-gunned to death by Nazi schutzstaffel.”

  “Fly, these lifts didn’t work too well even back when we had people maintaining them! They got stuck all the time. If the sensors detected anything in the shaft, you stopped at the floor above. If a door was open somewhere, the whole elevator could freeze. Go ahead and push the basement button . . . I’ll bet you a month’s pay we won’t make it more than a couple of levels; then we’ll have to find another lift somewhere.”

  I looked at her and snorted. “You’re so full of good cheer. Well, ready or not, here goes nothing.”

  Here went nothing, all right.

  I pushed the button; we started with a jerk and ground downward, skewing back and forth dangerously. As we descended toward the refinery, I saw that the lift didn’t take us there directly, but to a warehouse section we’d have to pass through first. In the distance we had an actual view of the refinery through large, gaping holes in the floors and ceilings. Some kind of fighting had gone on here.

  We had descended some fifty meters. What we could see of the refinery was laid out like an open maze; it was possible to see in the distance an expanse of pink, moving objects that looked like fleshy cubes or blocks. I hoped they weren’t alive, weren’t the next creatures on the hit parade. They were gigantic, reminding me of the “organic ladder” and the pulsing walls back on Phobos. Then we’d moved past the point where we could see the refinery. Our descent brought us to a more normal scene.

  “Normal” in this case meant a warehouse area stuffed with UAC boxes to the height of twelve feet or more and so densely packed as to create their own pseudocorridors. We’d noticed a number of humanoid figures with the familiar brown hide and white spikes scurrying for cover . . . back in imp country again.

  The lift stopped, not quite all the way to the floor; we had to jump down about three meters.

  Arlene peeked over the edge. “You owe me a month’s pay, Corporal Flaggart.”

  “Did I take the bet? I don’t recall saying any such thing.”

  “Native American giver.”

  We hopped out onto the ugliest, puke-green marble I’d ever seen; but it was still good to have something solid underfoot.

  “All right, PFC Sanders, let’s do this by the numbers.”

  “Sure, Fly. So which box is number one? And how come we never do stuff by the letters?” I threw her a withering glance, like an older brother to a pesky sister. We were ready to rock and roll.

  Fighting demons had spoiled me. I liked an enemy that didn’t shoot back. We popped through the warehouse like nobody’s business, pulse galloping, keyed to instant reaction. The refinery had its share of toxic ooze. We didn’t pay it any mind, but so far, there were only a few sticky regions instead of slime beach. I looked for barrels of the stuff, my favorite way of dealing with imps; but there were none.

  The first fireball missed us by a country klick. The second came too close to Arlene to suit me, so after I killed the imp, I wasted ammo . . . and killed him again to teach him a lesson. They were smart enough to duck in and out of the natural defenses provided by the stacked boxes, but not enough to gang up on us or show any other sign of working together. None of these guys were talking.

  Still, there were a lot more of them than there were of us. One almost got me from behind. If he’d had a partner, I’d have been dead meat. Instead, Arlene slid in behind the both of us and used her bayonet like a can opener. Busy as I was staying alive, I could appreciate the sheer grace of Arlene, back to the wall of boxes, cradling her sh
otgun like a baby; never mind dogs as “man’s best friend.”

  With hand gestures I indicated who would take which section. Another fifteen minutes and we were back in the same place. She’d killed more than I had. The warehouse area had been cleared.

  I was tired enough to wish one of those magical blue spheres would make an appearance. I hadn’t told her about that because it seemed too unbelievable, even in a place like this. But Arlene the mind reader had brought a small black case back with her. It looked medical. I’d have to start calling her “Doc.”

  Opening it, she produced a syringe filled with clear liquid, labeled “cardiac augmentation stimulation unit.” I held it for a second, then carefully passed it back to her as if it were a loaded weapon.

  “Can’t believe I found this,” she said. “It’s synthetic adrenaline to be used on patients who are in the throes of cardiac arrest.”

  “What would it do to you or me?”

  She paused, biting her lip again. “In a normal person, the adrenaline rush would make you super strong. There’s a drawback, though; it could also give you tachycardia and kill you.”

  “Just say no to having an edge,” I commented, taking the black package and its contents and adding it to my collection.

  “Fly, maybe we should toss it. That stuff could be too much of a temptation.”

  “Hey, if push comes to shove, we can inject one of them with it, right up their monster fundaments. All in the interests of science.”

  The only unlocked door led to a huge, green marble chamber with a collection of weird, red pillars. Pulsing veins stretched around these pillars like living ropes. The sharp, cloying odor of perspiration combined with the sick-sweet stench of rotting meat. Mechanical stuff was fine with me, even organic stuff like the arboretum. But I didn’t like it when they combined, and I couldn’t tell where one part left off and the other began. The throbbing of the veins matched the throbbing in my head.

  I was almost grateful for the appearance of a number of imps. At least they took my mind off the architecture. Then some more imps . . . and some more after that. Too much of a good thing.