Infernal Sky

by Dafydd ab Hugh

  Before we went outside, I had a good look at the face forming so close that I could have spit at it. Steam demons were handsome compared to it. Hell-princes would have been first choice for a blind date. The most hideous imp could have passed as Mr. America by comparison.

  The eyes were the opposite of the glowing orb in the crow’s head. All three were burning black dots, reminiscent of a fire eater’s. They were attached to a tube ending in an orifice that was apparently both mouth and nose. Yellow liquid dribbled out of the tube and sizzled against the side of the ship. An acid that sounded exactly like frying bacon! All this happened while the head was blurring around the edges as it struggled to complete itself. The thing made a snuffling, snorting sound.

  “Bile nozzle” seemed an apt name.

  Arlene went first, kicking off from the bulkhead and hurtling out through the hatch. We exited from the starboard side of the ship. Seemed like a good idea, because the remainder of the monster was on the port side. We worked fast before the enemy could become curious.

  Every time I used one of these transparent space suits I became a little less nervous about how flimsy they appeared. If Corporal Gallatin had been wearing one of the navy pressure suits when he had his accident, his lungs would have ruptured in the vacuum. I was beginning to understand what Gallatin meant about faith. I too had faith in this alien technology.

  We implemented Arlene’s plan before the monster got wise. Our extra-vehicular activity consisted of attaching the portable reactor packs to the outside of the ship. Then we turned them on and let them do the work.

  Slowly, oh, so very slowly, the packs began to turn the ship. We hovered in space like a hung jury. We were counting on one thing: that a creature which spent its entire existence in a weightless condition would have no familiarity with gravity. If our ship had been spinning it would have left us alone.

  If Arlene’s theory proved correct, the bile nozzle would experience something brand-new: the withdrawal of an invitation. A subtle hint he should go elsewhere. Or go to elsewhere, as S&R would have said.

  We were patched into the ship through our suits. Before the monster realized there was a problem, it made a kind of contented snoring sound. It didn’t take much to get the creature’s attention. The ship was spinning at 0.1 gravity when the snore changed to a howl of rage and desperation. Heavy thudding and liquid noises preceded its exiting the craft.

  We didn’t witness the part reuniting with the whole. We saw something better: the huge creature—maybe a third the length of the ship—zooming off into infinity. From this angle we could see what passed for its back—a series of tubes boosting the cloudlike swirling mess that was the rest of it. Right before it went out of range, the mass seemed to grow solid into something I’d compare to a turtle’s shell. If I ever met Commander Taylor again I’d recommend this thing for membership in the Shellback Society.

  I never did find out why Arlene wanted the biggest goddam boot we could find.

  When we were safe aboard, there were new troubles. S&R’s ship was not designed to take such acceleration along its radial axis. The structure had sustained severe damage and was leaking air like a son of a bitch. There were so many split seams we would never be able to patch them all.

  “We have no plan for to use airless ship,” said S&R, “but not to worry.”

  Not to worry? Where had I heard that before? Oh, it was from Mad magazine. Alfred E. Newman looked just like the last president of the United States. A fire eater had turned him into toast. It was worse than any congressional investigation.

  “Why shouldn’t we worry?” I wanted to know.

  “Space suits,” they answered.

  “We’ve lost time dealing with this monster,” observed Arlene. “There can’t possibly be enough air in the suits for the remainder of the trip.”

  Both Arlene and Fly insisted that S&R had no sense of humor, but the sound that came out of the alien mouths sounded like laughter to me. “Not to worry,” they repeated. “Enough air in belts for human life span!”

  I wasn’t the least bit surprised. We were ready to prove what tough guys we were. Marines! We could hold our breath longer than anyone, even those Navy SEALS on the Bova. We could hunker down in our suits as we slowly ran out of air . . . and not complain one time. Tough guys don’t complain. We could take it. We’d die without complaint, because we weren’t weaklings. We weren’t some inferior form of life. We weren’t civilians.

  As I looked at Fly and Arlene—they’d be first names to me for the rest of my life—I wondered if they felt the way I did. I’ve never met a sane marine. I’m not sure there is such a breed. That’s why my wife divorced me. Damned civilian.

  Arlene shot off one of her clever remarks: “A sufficiently advanced technology greatly reduces the number of cliffhangers.”

  So we’d come to this: we were a charity case in the custody of superior beings. We could kid ourselves all we wanted, but we were not as good as the aliens who ruled the galaxy. It was our good fortune to become pets to one side in a galactic war. The other side saw us as a nuisance.

  Fly spoke for all humanity when he demanded to know more about that other side. “No more surprises,” he told S&R. “You should have warned us about creatures like that bile nozzle thing. Did the Freds send it?”

  “Not coming from the Fred,” they assured him.

  “Just another creature who has received the Lord’s precious gift of life,” Fly sneered. “Well, it doesn’t matter, now that we’ve kicked its butt. Fill us in on the Freds. What are they like?”

  S&R hadn’t fought the Freds all this time without picking up a bit of knowledge. Our alien allies weren’t idiots. I was the idiot for not having requested this information myself. I feared that I was beginning to lose it. When the devils first appeared on Phobos and Deimos, it was a surprise to Fox Company. There was no briefing for Fly and Arlene. There was only survival. Before my fire team set foot on Phobos, I had pumped our fearless heroes for everything they remembered about Phobos and Deimos. S&R were the duo to pump now.

  The briefing consisted of projected images and a basic description of the main enemy, delivered in S&R’s funny English. I gasped when I saw that a Fred head looked like an artichoke. Eyeballs were sprinkled over their domes like raisins in a cake. The heads seemed a little small to me, but there was a good reason for this: The brains weren’t in the heads; the gray matter was housed in a safer place, down lower, in the armored chest. There was room there for a very large brain. The arms attached to the chest were rubbery affairs with semiarticulated chopsticks for fingers.

  “Avoid them sticking into you,” said S&R.

  “The fingers?” I prompted. The image showed us just what those fingers could do. Contained in tough but flexible skin sacks, the chopsticks were hard and sharp. With a flick of its rubbery arms, a Fred could make any or all of its fingers opposable.

  Moving on down the torso, we came to a waist so narrow I didn’t see how it could support the weight it carried. Then there were two thick legs, each ending in a foot that was very like a human foot, except that it included one feature of a bird’s claw: a toe in back, protruding from the otherwise human-looking foot.

  I wondered what S&R’s feet were like, but I wasn’t curious enough to ask them to remove their boots.

  Fly told us that the Freds wore tightly fitting boots. “Magnetized to them walking,” said S&R. “They are not liking free-falling.”

  “How reasonable!” Fly blurted out, and then the reality hit him. “Shit. You mean their ships are zero-g too?”

  “Same principles appliance,” said S&R.

  “The same principles apply.” Arlene corrected them this time.

  “Tell me something else,” demanded an irritated Fly. I didn’t stop the sergeant, because I agreed with him. “Were you going to let us fight the Freds without giving us any background?”

  “Humans like going to be surprised,” answered S&R.

  “Maybe humans like going into si
tuations blind,” said Fly. “Military men have more brains than that.”

  And their brains are in the right place, I added mentally.

  Then we reached the important subject: weapons. The Freds did not keep an armory on their ship equivalent to what even a self-respecting imp or zombie would pack. Basically they didn’t expect to be attacked. Pride goeth before the fall.

  Despite their confidence, every Fred carried a personal weapon that was fairly nasty. S&R warned us to keep an eye out for that. The weapons looked like slingshots with more moving parts and used an electromagnetic field to fire little flying saucers.

  S&R summed up: “We have no plan for to fight past making sabotage at Fred base. Other weapons they may be bringing to exteriorize.”

  “Do you mean exterminate?” asked Fly.

  The briefing improved my morale. I threw out: “Whatever you mean, Captain Sears and Roebuck, rest assured the United States Marine Corps always has a plan to kick butt.”

  After the crash course in Freds 101, the remainder of the trip was nothing to write home about. It was like the first part of the trip. The only difference was that we were wrapped in cellophane so we’d be nice and fresh at the other end.

  All good things come to an end.

  All bad things come to an end.

  “A teleporter ought to be nothing for you after your Gate problem,” Arlene said, trying to cheer me up.

  The damage to S&R’s ship provided an unexpected tactical advantage. We might never return to the message alien base, but now we had a nice decoy to distract the Freds while we used the teleporter. S&R sent the remains of their ship straight at a Fred defense satellite. We hated to see it go. It was a good ship.

  Disembarking from a ship had never been easier. There was no damage to the airlocks. We were already suited up and ready to go teleport-hunting. All in a day’s work.

  I would have said that if you’ve seen one transmatter device, you’ve seen them all, but that wasn’t true. This one didn’t have a stone arch built over it with lots of weird crap carved into it, though.

  I might have used my experience with the Gate on Phobos as an excuse for being superstitious, but there was no point. Much of what we’d seen since leaving our solar system made no sense according to our physics. So there was nothing for us to do but have faith in the engineering that worked. None of the amazing alien technology had let me down yet, except for one small Gate glitch.

  I waited my turn and took a deep breath. Then I stepped forward to meet my destiny.

  31

  I’d never heard a hairy bag of protoplasm call out my name before: “Fly!”

  Looking down, I noticed something glistening on the floor near my boot. I was slow on the pickup because I had my priorities. First, the boot. That meant we still had our clothes and weapons. Second, we were back in gravity. So what if my back hurt and my arches complained? Gravity, sweet gravity. Third . . . third, there was some kind of problem.

  Liquid was leaking from the flesh bag. It was sort of a faded pink I’d never associated with blood. I took a closer look at the bag and recognized a human mouth. I’d never seen a mouth all alone before, surrounded by a wrinkled mass of skin sweating pink stuff.

  The little voice in the back of my head was about to give me hell for not being more observant, and for not thinking at all. Arlene saved it the trouble with a scream. I didn’t blame her for screaming. I screamed too, the moment my brain started firing on all cylinders. The nitwit who came up with the idea that a strong woman should never scream had his head so far up his ass that daylight was a myth to him.

  S&R didn’t understand what had happened. They asked what had happened to the other units. They meant Hidalgo-Fly, and Hidalgo-Arlene. We tried to explain that the dying thing on the floor was Hidalgo. S&R would always have problems with the idea of death.

  Arlene and I were more acquainted with that idea. Even as the blob of protoplasm begged for us to “finish” it, we were simultaneously firing our zap guns. The two beams of heat crossed each other, carving the blob into smaller pieces that didn’t talk. We kept at it past the point of necessity.

  “Why did you send new unit away?” asked S&R. The Klave mind found what had happened intriguing. They may have thought Hidalgo had been transformed into something closer to them, a duality of some kind. I didn’t know. I didn’t care.

  The officer, the man Arlene had once considered spacing out an airlock, had proved himself one of Earth’s best. He’d been the leader of our fire team. We owed him what we had just done for him.

  Funny thing. He’d fought his quota of monsters. A steam demon had taken his wife. He’d kicked butt with hell-princes and spiders. On Phobos he was a bud, helping take down the imps and the flying skulls and the superpumpkin. He was a veteran of the Doom War.

  And a freakin’ teleporter nails him. Shit. A bleeding technological foul-up. It made me so mad I saw Mars-red. We owed him more than putting him out of his misery. We owed him words, a proper farewell due an honorable man.

  We gave him a different kind of farewell, worthy of a good marine. Our first Freds made the bad mistake of showing up just then. I didn’t leave any for Arlene or S&R. The ray guns made my job too easy.

  Yeah, right. Isn’t technology grand? It fries Hidalgo and then gives me a push-button method of avenging him. We kicked ass. Nothing made me feel better. The guns were light, and they didn’t need reloading. S&R mentioned they’d need recharging eventually, but they were good for a thousand kills per charge. I tried my best to use it up.

  A few Freds fired off a few saucers. Their aim was not up to Marine Corps standards.

  S&R aimed at the Freds’ chests to get the brain right away. When I realized the aliens could feel pain I started aiming for the artichoke heads and the arms and the legs. Arlene reminded me that we had a mission to perform. That didn’t help. I’d been inactive too long, bottled up too much. Now it was payback time.

  We came across two Freds making love. I recognized the process from S&R’s lesson. Their normal height was six feet. When one extended to over seven feet, it was ready to copulate; but only if another one was ready to be on the receiving end. The tall one would find a mate that had shortened down to under five feet. Then the tall one would insert its pyramidal head into the cavity in shorty’s head.

  They shared genetic information that way. The “male” turned bright red and the “female” turned a rich purple. A scientist would have found the demonstration endlessly fascinating. I found it more rewarding to interrupt the festivities by choosing my shots with imagination. Before they died, I’m certain these Freds felt some of what Hidalgo suffered.

  While I was amusing myself, S&R and Arlene found the main computer and loaded the program. Then they found me in a room running with alien blood. The color reminded me of iced tea.

  “What now?” I choked out the words. They tried to tell me the mission had been accomplished. This didn’t cut it. We hadn’t finished using our zap guns.

  “We have no ship any longer,” sighed Arlene. She turned to S&R and asked if they had any suggestions.

  Those boys sure did. There were functional teleport pads on the base. In the immortal words of S&R, “Gateways must go to Fred ships. Not safe to go.”

  The little voice in my head pointed out that we had run out of enemies to kill here. At no point did it bother me to think that I was failing to snuff out mind-consciousnesses or ghost-spirits. These alien monsters were dead enough for me.

  I shouldered the burden of command. Sergeant Taggart had a plan. “Let’s go!” covered both my strategy and my tactics.

  We booked. In my rage I forgot the ship would be in zero-g. But the moment I felt that old free fall spinning in my stomach, I reminded myself that the wonderful ray guns had no kick and were perfect weapons for this environment.

  Too bad they didn’t make the trip with us. Neither did our clothes or equipment. Yep, it was as if we’d gone through the Phobos Gate again. Stripped nekkid. There was
Arlene to port, her long, firmly muscled legs kicking slightly as if she were swimming. Kid sure had a nice ass. And there were Sears and Roebuck. Naked, they looked even more like Magilla Gorilla. But their feet were far more human than simian. I’d wondered about that.

  “What do we do now, Sergeant?” asked Arlene. She didn’t say it like my best buddy. She said it like someone who has been thinking more clearly than her superior officer.

  S&R came to my rescue. “We had no choice but to be remaining baseless.”

  While I tried to decide if that counted as a pun, Arlene began to cry. That was so unlike her that it helped bring me back to a semblance of sanity. I noticed her hand on her neck. Then I realized what was wrong. Her last link with Albert had been wiped out—the second ring, the honeymoon ring. No way could S&R re-create it outside their own lab.

  We didn’t have long to worry about that problem, however. The Freds on the ship soon noticed their stowaways-pirates-boarders. They had better aim than the ones at the base. They came clomping along the bulkhead in their magnetized boots, some below us, some above us. The saucers they were firing were coming closer and closer while we floated around, naked and helpless.

  This was when I realized I could have done a better job of planning for contingencies. In the few seconds of life remaining, I gave some cursory attention to the ship. Details might come in useful in the next life, always assuming this death theory for humans was inadequate to cover the facts.

  The ship was the same design as the Klave cruiser, but much longer. I’d guess it was 3.7 kilometers from stem to stern. The Fred spaceship had to be the largest cigar in the universe.

  While we ducked little flying saucers, I quickly reviewed what I’d learned and deduced from S&R’s briefing. They were too busy ducking to engage in dialogue, so I had to trust my memory.

  S&R had never come right out and said it, but the Freds were more like humans than the Klave in one important respect—they too were individualists. This was carried to a lunatic extreme in the lack of cooperation among the demonic invaders. I’d lost count of how many times Arlene and I had saved ourselves by tricking the monsters into fighting each other. In a choice between slaughtering humans and trashing each other, hell-princes and pumpkins opted for the latter every time.