Endgame

by Dafydd ab Hugh

  Arlene stared at me, mouth open. “We were fighting steam demons? In the computer?”

  The wind was harsh but not strong enough to blow me down again. The driver had cut the speed, now that the Res-men had lifted off in the Disrespect. The guy was a convert named Blinky Abumaha who used to be a fusion technician, damned useful if we were ever going to get off the rock. I stood up, facing toward the front, my face rubbed raw by the mini-gale, kicking up sand so fine it felt like a bad sunburn as it pocked my skin.

  “Arlene, leave him alone. I think Toku is telling the honest truth. . . . The damned thing really did work.”

  “Come again, Fly-boy? Maybe when you fell out, you landed on your head.”

  “It really did pull our soul out . . . but the Newbies, who are driving this technology revolution, they don’t know any kind of soul but their own—the standard soul in the galaxy. They only know the so-called biological soul, like Sears and Roebuck have, the kind that sticks around like a ghost in the body even after death.”

  “You saying we have a different kind of soul?”

  “It makes sense, doesn’t it? A.S., we’re the only creatures in the galaxy who can die . . . and we’re the only creatures who have anything like faith. Of course our soul works differently!”

  “So you’re saying when they used the machine . . .” Arlene faded away. I turned back, and she had her hand over her mouth, eyes wide behind her goggles.

  “I think you figured it out,” I said softly.

  “Fly, the machine duplicated our souls! There really is another version of Fly and Arlene out there, and they’ve got us back fighting the Fred monsters again. Oh Christ, those poor—ah, I was about to say—”

  “Those poor souls. Go ahead and say it, A.S. It’s literally true.” She spared me the echo, and I couldn’t get more than a grunt out of her all the way back to the Fred ship. In fact, my lance seemed lost in thought, not even staring at the fascinating scenery, klick after klick of barren gray-brown desert, the monotony broken only by sand dunes that flowed visibly across the surface, blown by the wind. The sand was so fine, it acted like a fluid . . . like ocean waves in slow motion.

  “Bullet for your thoughts,” I said, as the gigantic Fred ship, torn into pieces by the crash landing, hove into view.

  “You can’t figure it out?”

  “I’m not a mind reader, Corporal.”

  “You can’t add the Newbie device to Albert and get five?”

  “Five? Five what?”

  She shook her head, and I felt like a total idiot. Obviously, she was seeing something, but damned if I could guess what. “Come on, Arlene, you’re the sci-fi gal here, not me!”

  She put her hand familiarly on my knee. “Later, Fly. Okay?”

  I tried not to think of her hand sliding farther up my leg, but my body refused to cooperate. She must have somehow felt my mood; she removed her hand and snuck a quick glance southward. “Jesus, Fly, what’s got into you?”

  “Just thinking about the shellback initiation on the Bova,” I lied. “When you came out in the pasties and g-string, you really gave me a woodie.”

  “Really? Cool.” She smiled, then chuckled. “Remember the look on Albert’s face? I thought he was going to call me the Whore of Babylon! ‘Get thee behind me, Satan!’ ”

  “Hmph. You ought to quote the real Bible, if you have to quote something.”

  “You mean the Catholic Bible?”

  “Imprimatur, nihil obstat. The very same.”

  “All right, so how does the, ahem, real Bible say it?”

  “It’s not in the real Bible, of course.”

  Arlene rolled her eyes and muttered some dark blasphemy. And then we were there, at the gaping mouth of the Fred ship, the aft end of the final forward piece. Blinky Abumaha drove the hovercraft right inside the crack, forward as far as he could through the wrecked empty cargohold where we had whiled away many simple hours training and shooting at imaginary Freds. Then he parked the car, and we all piled off and started hoofing it forward, “through caverns measureless to man.”

  We pulled short at the first medical lab we found. During the time we had spent on the ship, the weeks heading toward Fredworld, then the weeks we followed the spoor of the Newbies to this barren place, Sears and Roebuck had finally, reluctantly, showed us a little bit about working the various machines and devices. I wondered if they realized that their own lives would someday depend upon how well they taught, how closely we observed?

  We slapped their bodies up on a pair of tables, and I took my first really close look since we found them dead in the circle of apostles. One of them—don’t ask me which—had a deep but cauterized beam wound across the chest. Cause of death: severe trauma to the left heart, severing of the greater and lesser aortae.

  The other Klave in the pair had beheld a beam in his own eye. (I had no idea whether anyone else had picked up a mote.) The thin beam fired straight through his retina into the head. “You know,” I said, pointing at the wound, “that shouldn’t have been fatal.”

  Arlene looked incredulous, so I explained it to her. “Klave don’t keep their brains in their heads; it’s under the stomach, here.” I tapped the point of the triangle formed by the Magilla Gorilla body, just above the stubby legs that could work so fast the human eye couldn’t even see them.

  “Well,” she said cautiously, “did he maybe die because the other one died?”

  I shrugged, nodded. “I can’t imagine one dead, one alive; maybe they couldn’t either.”

  I felt for pulses in all the most likely spots. Neither gorilla was alive by any test I could think up on the spot. “Come on, you apes,” I said, “you wanna live forever?”

  Only Arlene laughed. I guessed that two hundred years hadn’t treated Mr. Heinlein kindly. We folded up the massive arms of the Klave with the heart and aorta damage and shoved him into one of the machines, the one that was supposed to repair the gross physical damage in major organs. If we could get them up and relatively functional, they could probably take over the finer points of surgery themselves, stuff like the eye damage and the numerous burns and ribbon lacerations.

  The machine looked like a huge chest of drawers, with the bottom drawer big enough for a Fred, which meant nearly enough for a Klave. We managed to stuff the hairy gorilla into the thing anyway, but I was almost at the point of severing one of the arms and letting Sears or Roebuck reattach it later. Fortunately, it didn’t come to that. S and R might be totally ice when it came to mutilating bodies, but that wasn’t taught in Light Drop Combat Tactics School.

  I twisted the dials in the upper left drawer to indicate “circulatory system”—the Freds used visual icons, fortunately, since I didn’t speak Fredish—while Arlene cycled through a seemingly endless catalog of different species, looking for Klave. “Jeez, Fly, there’s no end to them! It’s like that party scene at the end of that stupid movie, The Pandora Point, where six million different aliens swarm the place, and Milt Kreuger has to make them all cocktails he never heard of.”

  She almost selected one version, but I pointed out that the most distinguishing characteristic of the Klave was that they were always paired. The icon she found showed only a single entity—“you can’t tell me the Freds don’t know that much about the Klave after six million years of warfare!” So she continued the cycle, and eventually she found the correct species—as I predicted, even the icon showed them doubled.

  “Okay, we ready to rock ’n’ roll?” I asked.

  “Hit it, Tiger.”

  I took a deep breath and punched the button marked with a large up-arrow; it turned from blue to yellow. The devil machine began grinding and scraping. I shouldn’t have been surprised. It was Fred technology, after all, so of course it sounded like a brake failure at the end of the universe.

  When the bellows finally stopped pumping and the Jacob’s Ladder stopped sparking, the go button turned back to blue. A pale wisp of smoke curled from the bottom drawer, and I heard a muffled yelp. Arlen
e and I wrestled the drawer open. Inside was a living Klave, blinking rapidly and trying to focus his eyes. Arlene unlatched the side of the drawer, and either Sears or Roebuck tumbled out onto the deck.

  The overcaptain and the other converts stepped backward at the sight of the mighty Klave. Evidently, they had never seen one this close before we showed up, and they were still nervous about the massive arms, barrel chest, and tiny squirming legs. The patient staggered to his feet, staring around in confusion as if looking for something he had lost.

  He spied it and ran to the other table, making peculiar whimpering noises deep in his throat. He ignored me and everybody else; he had eyes only for the other member of his pair. I started to worry. If this was how Sears (why not?) was going to behave, how were we going to ask him to repair Roebuck?

  Then a miracle happened. I was getting pretty used to them by then. Sears (if it were he) stared so hard at Roebuck’s still form that the latter suddenly sighed, coughed up some blood, and spontaneously came back to life. “Well,” I said, “it makes sense in a perverse sort of way: he pined away from loneliness, so now he comes back to life for company.”

  We withdrew, all of us, and allowed the Klave a couple of hours alone together. Overcaptain Tokughavita kept us riveted with a blow-by-blow account of our mighty battle against the Fred-designed genetic monsters for control of Earth. . . . I got utterly bored after the first five minutes. Either Jill got everything wrong or the overcaptain’s reputation for a steel-trap memory was a PR scam! But Arlene found it fascinating, and respect for an officer, even one who thought I was the Messiah, forced me to sit quietly while he talked and talked and talked and talked. When he finally finished, Sears and Roebuck were fully cured and together again, and I was damned well informed on the subject of my own exploits a couple of centuries before.

  I called a huge conference of all eighteen of us. Sears and Roebuck began formally introducing themselves; I watched with great amusement while they kept isolating every possible pair of converts (182 possibilities, according to Arlene) and reintroducing themselves, only to be utterly confused when one of the pair would insist they had just met. But I called a halt, so we wouldn’t spend the next six years on intros.

  “Boys—and girls, sorry you three—we’re stuck on this rock, and there are two huge problems relating to that: first, unless we want to die here, we have to rescue ourselves; but, second, much more important, we have a mission to accomplish—we have to get after the Resuscitators and stop them from invading Earth, or, failing that, defend Earth from their invasion. Any suggestions?”

  Everyone looked at his brother. At last, Sears and Roebuck gingerly raised a massive arm each. “Um, I can get I know a way up to orbit, but not farther there.”

  “How can you get us up to orbit?” asked Arlene, my personal Doubting Thomas. “You’re not saying you can get this pile of dung to fly, are you?”

  “Certainly not! But I can get I know a way up to orbit, and it’s with the escape-ship pod.”

  I frowned. “You mean there’s an escape pod on board? Powerful enough to boost us to orbit?”

  Sears and Roebuck looked at each other, possibly “laughing” at my poor English. Klave were very arrogant about their language ability.

  But Arlene was stuck in her cynical mood. “What the hell good does that do us? So we can get to orbit—yippie ki-yay. Then what?”

  Overcaptain Tokughavita leapt up. “Battle fleet! Can take battle fleet from People Armed to Repel Invasion!”

  “People armed what? What is that?”

  “Is moon of this planet; moon is artificial, contains many and many interstellar ships.”

  “Jesus Christ, Toku, why didn’t you bother to mention this before?”

  “No use,” he explained. “Fleet inside moon, not on planet surface, like us. Irrelevant.”

  I stood for a long moment, simmering. When I spoke, it was the cold, quiet, reasonable tone of voice that sent shivers up and down Arlene’s back. She knew what it meant. “Men, I’m going outside, find a steel ventilation grate, and kick it to shreds. I’ll be back shortly.”

  It wasn’t just that latest round of idiocy; it was the entire setup. Was there ever anyone more put-upon than I? I found the grating, raised my boot, and gave it about six killer gruesome whacks, like Lizzie Borden with the ax. When I finally limped inside, I felt much better.

  When I returned, feeling cleansed, I issued the necessary orders: “Sears and Roebuck, get that escape pod ready. Toku, Abumaha, you guys know how to unlock the ships and fire up the engines? Good, get your trash ready, then assist the Klave, if they need it. Arlene, ah, keep an eye on everyone else.”

  “Gee, thanks a lump, Sarge.”

  “That’s the price of being a junior non-com. When you get everything ready and you’re set to go, you’ll find me in the forward engine room, looking for Fred bodies to kick around.”

  The Freds, it turned out, were not as crazy as their architecture suggested. They were very protective of their own safety, like the other races of the galaxy who expected lifespans in the hundreds of thousands or millions of years. In fact, they built life pods into their ships every few hundred meters! We had our choice of not one but three different escape pods, even in the section of Fred ship remaining intact.

  Sears and Roebuck led the expedition along the outermost corridor of the ship. It was a royal pain: the Fred boat was never meant to sit on the surface of a planet; they figured it would always remain in orbit . . . hence, there was no provision for walking on what amounted to the ceiling of the ship! Everything on the ventral side was smashed beyond repair, of course, by S and R’s creative landing, and the dorsal side was all upside down.

  We jumped and banged at the hatch-open lever for what seemed like forever, and I ended up slipping and cracking my kneecap against a dead light tube that was supposed to descend from the ceiling, but now stuck up from the deck. Finally, S and R reluctantly hoisted Arlene up high, holding her face up against the hatch with their Popeye arms, while she worked all the crap to cycle the now-useless airlock.

  We hoisted ourselves up and inside. It was a hell of a tight fit; it was meant for about five Freds and was stuffed like a comedy sketch with eighteen of us (including two gigantic Klave, much bigger than the Freds even in their seed-depositing stage). We swarmed over one another like termites; now, if it had been me and seventeen girls, I could get into the possibilities. But I detested making inadvertent contact with other males, so I pushed myself into a corner and just observed.

  Sears and Roebuck clumped up to the driver’s seat, walking over people like they were rocks across a stream. They both squeezed into the side-by-side pilot and co-pilot chairs and started flipping levers and twisting dials.

  The interior was very podlike: spherical, uncomfortable, dark and metallic, stuffed with nav equipment. It smelled like a mixture of machine oil and—sour lemons! Shades of Phobos and the zombies. One entire end was taken up by a huge bulge poking halfway to the center of the pod—probably the engine cowling.

  “Preparing yourself for taking immediately off!” Sears and Roebuck warned—and without giving us even a moment to do so, they pushed the button.

  The whole freaking pod exploded. That’s what it felt like when it detached from the ship—a huge gut-wrenching explosion. People and gear flew everywhere, and something really hard creased my cheek. Arlene screamed, but it was more a yelp of surprise than pain or agony.

  We rose like a bullet. As soon as we cleared the ship and started to fall back, Sears and Roebuck rotated the pod and kicked on the chemical rocket engines. They accelerated at only a couple g’s, enough to get us moving. My God, but they were loud! My entire body pounded, thumping at the resonant frequency of the frigging engines. I couldn’t hear a thing—the noise was beyond hearing. I plugged my ears (everyone did), but it didn’t help much.

  Then the Klave flipped on the big boys, the fusion drive, and we roared away from the desert planet at an even eleven g’s. That w
as the end of my reportage.

  The humans all passed out, and by the time Sears and Roebuck revived us, we were coasting in zero-g—my favorite!—in a mini-Hohmann transfer orbit toward eventual rendezvous with the tiny artificial moon. Sears and Roebuck piloted like apes possessed, cheerfully informing the assembled multitude that “we should make able the moon just before out of running of reaction mass! Good damn chance!”

  Their quiet understated confidence was starting to keep me awake nights.

  19

  We hit the moon at “dawn.” Dawn is a location on the moon, not a time. It’s tide-locked, so each lunar day is an entire lunar cycle of fourteen days; you can’t see the terminator creep, as you can on Earth if you stand on a mountain and look east across a plain (at the equator, the Earth’s surface spins at about sixteen hundred kilometers per hour, a thousand miles per hour: circumference of the Earth divided by twenty-four). But the moon, smaller than Deimos, had an atmosphere! In the two hundred years since we’d been gone—or a hundred and sixty, actually; the moon was built forty years before and named People Armed to Repel Invasion, henceforth PARI—we humans cracked the secret of the gravity generators we found on Phobos and Deimos, the one final secret of the First Ones that no one else had figured out in millions of years of trying . . . but was it our achievement, or the Newbies’? When did they infect us?

  PARI had a gravitational acceleration of about 0.4 g, enough to hold a thin breathable atmosphere. God only knew who built the original gravity generators around Sol and the other star systems; it was one of the biggest mysteries about which the Deconstructionists and Hyperrealists were fighting—somehow the cause of the split, or one of the causes, if we could believe Sears and Roebuck! But still, neither Arlene nor I had a clue why . . . something about schools of lit-crit and eleven freaking story fragments.

  The damned moon was deserted, like a ghost mining town in Gold Rush country. “Where are all the people?” I asked.

  Tokughavita answered, unaware of the volumes his response spoke. “Joined ship when arrived, left with us to surface.” He had just admitted that the humans abandoned their post! There was only one reason they would have done that: the crew of the Disrespect had infected them . . . or vice versa.