Infernal Sky

by Dafydd ab Hugh

  So if it had worked a hundred times before, why not try for one hundred and one? “Hand-to-hand combat!” I shouted. “I don’t think they’re that much stronger than we are.” I was certain that none of us in this ship were as strong as S&R.

  “Maybe we can grab one of their guns,” suggested Arlene.

  “No Fred guns can be used for going to kill by you,” said S&R. It took a moment for their meaning to sink in—namely, that the weapons could be activated only by a Fred.

  I set the example. Much as I hated zero-g, I’d spent so much time in it lately that I’d developed a knack for turning it to my advantage. A new form of martial arts could be developed in free fall.

  Kicking off from the wall, I grabbed the nearest Fred and yanked that sucker right out of his magnetic boots. Momentum was on my side; it was my new pal. I threw the alien into two of its comrades. They didn’t act like pals. If they had any brains in those big chests, they’d have reasoned out what I was doing, then extrapolated from it and cooperated with one another.

  What an irony. Arlene and I were two of the most rabid individualists any collectivist could ever have the misfortune to meet. The Klave collective had thrown in with their antithesis, Homo sapiens, against a common foe.

  Could the ultimate error of the bad guys be their deconstructionism? They took everything apart, leaving no basis for rational self-interest.

  Food for thought. Philosophy to while away the time after we cleansed this ship of its owners. S&R were using a different fighting technique. They were mainly crushing their opponents, and ripping out whole portions of the chest area. Arlene and I were succeeding in making the Freds fight among themselves.

  Suddenly S&R called out a warning. The Fred coming up beneath me apparently wore an insignia S&R recognized as some kind of biological scientist, a med-Fred. When this one grabbed me and pulled me down, I could see that it understood something about our species.

  Instead of jabbing its chopstick fingers toward my chest, where it might puncture my heart, it went for my brain, assuming the only real weakness of the Freds must also be a human weakness.

  Never assume.

  It jabbed one of its killer fingers into the area where it had learned humans keep their brains—the head. But this alien’s research was slightly inadequate. The needle of pain hurt like blazes, as it went through my cheek, but he missed my brain by the side of a barn door.

  Then it was my turn. I ripped into his head like it was a piece of rotten cabbage. I think it screamed as I kept working down, down, down to the part of a living thing that can anticipate bad things before they happen. I laughed. I was getting back to doing what I do best.

  By some miracle we cleaned out the section we were in. Then we moved to the next. Although similar to the Klave ship in terms of engineering, the inside of this vessel was composed of separate compartments. As we floated from one section to the next, like angels of death, my theory received endless vindication: the Freds were not communicating with each other!

  We simply repeated the process until our arms and legs were so tired we had to stop. Then we resumed our attack, and still the pods had not communicated with each other. Only at the end did we encounter a different sort of Fred.

  This one might have been the captain of the ship. He was the smartest, and he had a weapon that almost wiped us out. “Look out for the Fred ray!” S&R shouted in one of their clearest sentences, saving Arlene and me from the brink of destruction. We pushed each other out of harm’s way. While we bounced off the bulkheads and bobbed around like corks in a bottle, a searing beam of white energy missed us and melted one wall of the pod. Fortunately the integrity of the ship’s bulkhead was not compromised.

  S&R took care of this Fred personally. Four strong hands took the cabbage apart. Afterward we discovered we should have taken this one down first. But how were we to know this particular artichoke had access to the ship’s main computer? Damned thing didn’t even look like a computer. Looked like a blender to me.

  The top Fred had programmed the ship to go . . . somewhere. There was nothing we could do to alter the program. We’d succeeded in killing all the Freds. But we were stuck on their Galaxy Express with a oneway ticket. Arlene was not happy about this.

  Epilogue

  I will never see Albert again. I’d reconciled myself to accepting him as a sixty-seven-year-old. I could have still loved him. At least we would have been together again.

  But Fly had to take the mission to the limit. I saw that berserker look come over him after Hidalgo died, and I understood. I also knew we might not have come through alive without that fire in him. When I can think again, I’ll tell Fly I understand.

  Now I can only feel my loss. By the time we arrive at our destination and turn around, Albert will have been in his grave for centuries. So I sit alone at one end of the ship while Fly sits at the other. The Fred ship has large picture windows.

  I watch the stars contract to a small red disk at the center of the line of travel. Fly watches a similar disk, but his is blue. We do not talk. He searches for words that I do not want to hear.

  We both wonder what the human race will do in the next several thousand years.

  DOOM Novels Available from Pocket Books

  KNEE-DEEP IN THE DEAD by Dafydd ab Hugh and Brad Linaweaver

  HELL ON EARTH by Dafydd ab Hugh and Brad Linaweaver

  INFERNAL SKY by Dafydd ab Hugh and Brad Linaweaver

  ENDGAME by Dafydd ab Hugh and Brad Linaweaver

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  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

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  Copyright © 1996 by id Software, Inc. All rights reserved.

  This work is based upon the computer software games DOOM® and DOOM H®. DOOM copyright © 1995, 2005 by id Software, Inc. All Rights Reserved. DOOM and the id Software name are registered trademarks of id Software, Inc. in the United States and/or other countries.

  Originally published in paperback in 1996 by Pocket Books

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  ISBN-13: 978-0-671-52563-7

  ISBN-13: 978-1-416-52517-2 (eBook)

  First Pocket Books printing June 1996

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  Cover art by Robert Hunt

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