Endgame

by Dafydd ab Hugh

  It was getting hard to talk. We needed all our breath to bear down, forcing blood back into our heads. Thank God we were lying down—at now six g’s, sitting up we might have passed out. I knew what was happening: the Fred ship, strong as it was, was never intended to burn through the atmosphere like this! It was fracturing along heat seams, separating into the components that had been attached by the Freds when they assembled the vehicle, probably in orbit. The damned thing was way too long for this sort of monkey crap.

  “Forward!” I shouted, nearly blacking out with the effort. Arlene stared, confused—lack of oxygen-bearing blood in her brain, maybe—so I repeated, “Forward! Nav Room One!”

  If any component of the ship was to survive the fiery reentry, it would be the biggest, strongest section—the decks and compartments where the engines actually burned, shook, and vibrated. Besides, if that section went, we would all die anyway—no pilot!

  We weren’t far from it, maybe a couple of hundred meters. But it was a marathon! Arlene strained and slithered forward, like a snake; I tried to follow suit, but the best I could do was a humping motion that wrenched my back something fierce. God, to be young again, and supple. The monstrous gravity squeezed us to the ventral deckplates like an enormous boot stamping on our backs. Each compartment was connected to the next by a flexible rubber bottleneck that could easily be sealed to isolate a puncture. The rubber mouths became jaws of death, smothering and suffocating us as we wriggled through them. We could have used some petroleum jelly; I had plenty . . . about a kilometer behind us in my seabag.

  After the first four rooms, my muscles were so sore I grunted with pain with every meter crawled. Arlene was crying; I’d almost never seen her cry before, and never from sheer physical pain. It scared me—the world was ending!

  The groans from the ship as it tore itself apart sure as hell sounded like the end of the world, the universe grinding down noisily . . . long drawn-out moans, a loud noise like the cry of a humpbacked whale, shrieks and sobs, the wailing of the damned in hell, gnashing their teeth. The devil himself danced around me in hooves and pointed tail, laughing and capering, pointing at me in my mortal distress. Or was it a hell prince minotaur? A horrible hallucination; my Lord, I surely did see him, in flesh of red and reeking of sulphur and the grave. Then a steam demon and a boney leapt through the walls! Old home week for Fred monsters!

  But I knew where salvation lay, for’ard, for’ard to Nav Room One. When Arlene faltered and tried to lie down and die in front of me, I put my hand on her flattened derrière and shoved with a strength I’d never felt before. The handful of ass moved ahead, dragging the girl along with it.

  Another four rooms, only two left. My belly and chest were scraped raw, and my groin ached with the agony of a well-placed jackboot. Spittle ran down my chin, smearing on the deck and dehydrating me. We suffered under a full eight g’s then, according to my wrist accelerometer, and even my eyeballs throbbed with pain, horribly distended toward the deck. Color had long since disappeared, and even the black and white images I could still see narrowed to a tunnel of light. Blurry outlines bent and twisted under the force. Again, the ship skewed, spun out of control until Sears and Roebuck regained control. How the hell were they flying the ship? Were there even any control surfaces left?

  We shoved through the last two rubber collars; I almost died in the second when my bulk stuck fast, and I couldn’t breathe for the clingy seal across my mouth and nose. Arlene saved my life then, reaching back into the bottleneck, somehow mustering the strength to drag me forward by my hair a meter, clearing the rubber from my face. At last, we lay on the floor of Nav Room One, broken and bleeding from nose and ears, unable to see, hugging the deck like drunks at the end of a spree.

  I heard sounds above the shredding of the ship behind us, words—Sears and Roebuck saying something. Desperately, I focused. “Being—shot.” They gasped. “Shot at down—defenders shooting—ship breaking into part—loosing controlling.”

  Shot? Shot at? What the hell was this outrage? It was just too much, on top of the agony of reentry, to have to put up with this weaponry BS as well! “Kill—bastards,” I wheezed. Ho, fat chance; more likely, we would all die before the ship even hit the ground—blown apart by relentless defenders with particle-beam cannons.

  I passed out, only for a moment; I woke to hear Sears and Roebuck repeating over and over, “Dirt alert! Dirt alert!” I opened my eyes, focused just long enough to see the ground rushing up like a freight train, then went limp and dark again. I composed my epitaph: Goodbye, cruel alien world.

  Sears and Roebuck must have flared out at the last moment, for I felt the nose rise majestically. Then the remaining tail section of the Fred ship, whatever was left, struck the ground with particular savagery, and the ship slammed belly-first into what turned out to be silica sand. A miracle that proved my faith—had it been granite or water, we would have been atomized. We were still traveling at least mach four when we painted the desert, and we plowed a twenty-seven-kilometer furrow across the surface of the planet, kicking up sandy rooster tails taller than the Buchanan Building in the forty seconds it took us to slide to a stop.

  When the landing was over, we lay on the deck panting and gasping. Sears and Roebuck were out; they were used to a lot heavier gravitation than we, but that shock was a bit much even for them, being seated in the pilot’s chair. The ship’s safety procedures performed as advertised, shedding pieces of ship well back over the horizon to dissipate the energy, while protecting the for’ard compartments of the ship, where the most precious intelligent cargo would have clustered.

  Arlene was already sitting up on her butt when I awoke; her head was back as she tried to staunch a pretty bad nosebleed. I tasted a lot of blood, but it was a few seconds before I realized I had lost my left, upper, outermost incisor. I vaguely looked for it, still somewhat groggy, but it was nowhere to be seen. I started to blink back to conscious awareness.

  Arlene saw that I was awake. Without lowering her head, she croaked, “I guess—that wasn’t—the world’s greatest landing.”

  Holding my jaw, which had started to throb, I had time to mutter a Marine definition: “A good landing is anything you walk away from.” Then the pain really hit me all over, and I was busy gritting my teeth and stifling screams until Arlene kindly injected me with a pain suppressor and stimulant from her combat armor medipouch.

  Sears and Roebuck woke up, little the worse for wear. “Shall we to outgo and face the new brave world?” they cheerfully asked. It was the closest I’d ever come to fragging two of my own men.

  8

  “Livable?” asked Arlene, her voice hoarse and painful to hear.

  Sears and Roebuck grunted. “Justice a minute, justice a minute.” They tapped at several keys on the command console, hmming and humming as the few sensors that had not burned off in the crash sampled the air, the radiation levels, the temperature, and looked for any dangerous bacteria, viruses, molds, or other microorganisms. “Not to kill,” they announced at last

  “Healthy?” I gasped.

  “Not to kill.”

  Their irritating evasiveness put me on my guard, but what could we do? The ship’s air seal was ruptured, and we soon would be sucking down Skin-walker’s air, whether we wanted to or not. The machinery that manufactured the nutrition pills was back a kilometer in the ship and was probably smeared across the landscape. So we would soon enough be eating local food and drinking local water, if there was any—or dying of thirst and hunger. Our combat suits would serve as a limited shield against radiation, but they would only mitigate, not negate the ill effects. For good or ill, we were cast upon the shores of Skinwalker, offered only wayfarer’s bounty.

  God, how poetic. We would either be able to digest the local produce or die trying.

  We picked ourselves up off the floor, painfully peeling the deckplates away from our skin. Arlene wasn’t hit as hard as I—less mass per surface area. Our armor was pounded hard, protective value prob
ably compromised but still better than zip. Despite their chipper words, Sears and Roebuck had a hard time peeling themselves out of the command chair (which had survived remarkably intact). Arlene let me lean on her shoulders, and our pilots supported each other, as we limped to the emergency hatch. I pulled the activation lever. Explosive bolts blew outward, taking the hatch cover with them.

  Shaking, we climbed down the ladder, two hundred meters or more. It was a straight shot, not staggered the way human ladders generally are: if one of us were to slip. . . . I nervously watched Sears and Roebuck above me, but I shouldn’t have worried; their legs may have been ridiculously short, but they were powerful—all due to the high gravity of the Klave homeworld. Arlene and I were more likely to slip and fall in the relatively modest gravity of the planet, about 0.7 g.

  The world looked like the Mojave Desert, or maybe we just happened to land in a desert area. I hadn’t gotten much of a look during the crash. I looked up. The sky was too pale, but I saw oddly square clouds, almost crystalline; we had weather, evidently. Bending down, grimacing, I lifted a handful of sand: the grains were finer than Earth sand, fine enough that I decided Arlene and I should wear our biofilters; really, really fine silica can clog up your alveolae and give you something like Black Lung Disease. Thereafter, we spoke through throat mikes into our “lozenge” receivers. I don’t know what Sears and Roebuck did when I pointed out the problem; they had their own radio.

  The brownish gray sandscape depressed me. Under a pale sky, the only spots of color were the green and black of our standard-issue combat suits and Sears and Roebuck’s muted orange flightsuits, which they had worn ever since the mission began. Everything else was the color of dingy gray socks that hadn’t been washed in a month.

  “Okay, S and R, what the hell did you mean about us being shot at?” My tongue couldn’t help exploring the new hole in my mouth, where the tooth had been; the hole still throbbed, but the sharp pain was gone. Gotta get S and R to fix this, I promised.

  “Meaned what was said; they were firing at us shots from cannons.”

  “Energy weapons, artillery shells, what?” Extracting usable information from Sears and Roebuck was worse than sitting through a briefing by Lieutenant Weems—may he rest in peace for a good long time.

  “Were firing they slugs from the electromagnabetic accelerating gun.”

  “Um, a rail gun?” asked Arlene, picking up on the answer faster than I. Anything to do with exotic technology or weaponry was A.S.’s subject—she could lecture for hours on ogre tanks and orbiting “smart spears,” and she sometimes did.

  “Yes, the rail gun,” confirmed Sears and Roebuck. I sort of knew what a rail gun was: you took slugs of depleted uranium, encased them in a ferromagnetic shell casing, and accelerated them to several kilometers per second velocity using electromagnets. The resulting “gun” could damn near put shells into orbit—they moved so fast, they punched through any sort of imaginable armor like a bullet through thin glass. It was a horrific weapon we had never been able to make work properly. The first shot always destroyed the target, but generally also our rail-gun prototype!

  I licked dry lips. If the enemy—Newbies or Freds?—could build a tactical-size version, our combat armor would be utterly useless; if we ever took a shot, we’d be toast.

  The desert was evidently deserted; but the solitude did not begin to compare to the vast loneliness of the starry void. I stared at the desolation, taking some comfort in the feel of ground beneath my feet, the breath of wind against my armor. The air smelled tangy—ozone—but so far I was breathing all right. “Hey S and R,” I called, softly under such a sky, “is that ozone from our ship, or is it natural to the atmosphere?”

  “We didn’t detect it orbitally,” they answered in unison. I shrugged. If any of us had asthma, it might have been a problem. But I never had any, Arlene’s was cured by the doctors at NAMI, and Sears and Roebuck could take care of themselves.

  “Which way toward the dinks who were shooting at us?” Arlene asked. Sears and Roebuck turned slowly through the entire 360-degree panorama, then pointed basically along the twenty-seven kilometer trench our ship had dug. Arlene turned to me, raising her brows like a pair of question marks.

  Toward or away from danger? Didn’t seem to be much of a choice. S and R had detected no signs of civilization on the planet—no powerlines, power-plants, canals, or structures larger than two or three stories. If there was anything smaller, it wouldn’t have shown up on their quick microwave scan. So far as I could tell, the only sign of intelligent life was the gun battery that had pounded our ship into rubble.

  Oh, what the hell! “Let’s at least eyeball the wogs and see who they are. My guess is they don’t belong here any more than we do.”

  The air temp on the desert Arlene dubbed the Anvil of God was livable; Sears and Roebuck hadn’t lied. But they never claimed it was comfortable . . . and 60 degrees centigrade certainly didn’t qualify. Our helmets kept the direct sunlight off our heads, and we had several days’ worth of water if we used the recirc option, pissing into a tube and recycling it back to the drinking nipple. Arlene was not happy about doing that. Being a female, this meant she had to strip and pee into a bedpanlike device, whereas I just wore a sheath. There were no trees, so no privacy. She could have turned her back, but in a typical act of defiance, A.S. just did it right in front of me and the Klave. I pretended nonchalance, as if women urinated in front of me all the time—Arlene had done it before, anyway, in combat situations. But in reality I was shocked and embarrassed every damned time . . . but I sure wasn’t about to let Arlene know that! I would never hear the end of it.

  We cut off the furrow about two klicks laterally and paralleled it, figuring that whoever was shooting at us would follow the skidmarks to see what he had shot down. The armor monitored the outside air, regulating heat venting to prevent us showing a hot signature on an infrared optical device, and we kept the mikes cold and ultrashort range—outside of five to seven meters, the fuzzy signal attenuated into the background noise. We had a reasonably good chance of not getting caught, and, damn it, I wanted to see those bastards with their itchy trigger fingers, see them up close and personal!

  We had passed directly over the battery about fifty klicks back; the journey would take us at least two days and some . . . but after only ten kilometers, we ran into a scouting party from the wogs driving some kind of land cart. Not literally ran into—we picked them up when they were still five klicks range, tracking directly along our ship’s wake.

  Trusting to our electronic countermeasures, we loped toward them until we were within half a klick; at that point, we dropped to our bellies and crawled the remaining distance, while the bad guys broke for lunch. Arlene and I were both hungry, but we were rationing our Fred food . . . and especially our Fredpills.

  We got within a hundred meters, easily within range of my M-14 BAR and the lever-action .45-caliber rifle that Arlene toted for those occasions where a shotgun just wouldn’t do. We watched them through our scopes, trying to figure out who they were.

  They looked oddly human, but their heads and bodies were covered by thick pressure suits that might have had battlefield capability. Their proportions were humanoid. There were four scouts and one supervisory type with a notepad built into his wrist armor; I can smell an officious, jerky sergeant a klick off.

  “Sarge,” Arlene said faintly over the radio, “there’s no cover, and we can pop most of them before they burrow into the sand. We can take them before they know what hit; they might not even get off a message.”

  I hesitated—not a good move for a battlefield non-com, but sometimes you really don’t have enough intel. “Hold your fire, A.S. Let’s see if we can hear them first.”

  I programmed my electronic ears to scan sequentially all sixty-four million channels, looking for anything non-random; I caught a few tiny bursts of information, but nothing that lasted longer than 0.02 seconds, according to the log. “You pick up anything?” I a
sked.

  “Fly, I’m getting bursts of pattern from channel 23-118-190 that last about 0.02; they all last just that long. You seeing that?”

  “Now that you mention it—”

  “I think whoever they are, they use much narrower frequency channels than we use; we’re kind of scanning past them by scanning up and down within the channel. Let me small this thing down and just scan up and down at that freq. Stand by.”

  I would have done the same thing, except I hadn’t exactly paid attention during my techie classes in radio-com. I waited, fuming, while Arlene made the necessary software adjustments. I kept the aliens in my scope, following their progress up the “road” formed by our long skid to rest. Finally, she finished tapping at her wrist and came back to me. “Here, plug into me.” I fitted my female connector over her wrist prongs. A couple of seconds later, I started hearing what obviously were words in recognizable sentences.

  There was something damnably familiar about the rhythms and pauses in the speech; I was sure I had heard it before. Even the words sounded tantalizingly close to something I could understand—a little clearer than Dutch, I reckoned. If I strained, I could almost make out what they were saying.

  I realized with a chill that there was no almost about it: I did understand them—they were speaking English! But it was a harsher, colder kind of English, peppered with utilitarian gruntlike words I had never heard. I could even tell who was speaking by the odd mannerisms they used when they made a point. Now that I knew they were human, I could even see their body-language expressions, though they held themselves with a studied limpness that irritated me. With omissions, I heard an exchange between the sergeant and one of the scouts.

  “Are [new word] [new word]-destroyed ship?”

  “Carried it [new word], sub-sir. Saw it [new word].”

  “Was Fred; pattern-match was [new word], old ship from [new word]. Should have [new word]-shot back. Don’t like this; something [new word].”