Endgame (10 page)

Suddenly heavy again after weeks of acceleration ranging from 0.8 g down to zero, I dragged every footstep, and my legs and back ached. Arlene didn't have it so bad, since she didn't mass as much as I; she still had a spring in her step and an increasingly grim smile on her face. I knew the feeling; it had been months since I killed anything. After what the Freds had done to my life and my world, I developed the taste for blood. Now that the Newbies had deprived me of my rightful revenge, I was prepared to transfer all that wrath to the new threat.

In short, I wanted to pump a few rounds into a nice, smooth Newbie chest. But I was also starting to get very, very nervous about what they had managed to evolve into in the four decades they had been down on the planet we approached—assuming they were still there. I saw a number of possible outcomes, none of them pleasant: the frustration of finding no one, the humiliation of capture, the agony of us being annihilated.

Then without warning one day, the reactor braking suddenly stopped, sending Arlene and me flying (literally, the for'ard bulkhead that had been a deck became a wall instantaneously, dropping us to the outer bulkhead, which now was our only “floor”!). “We're coming in down to landing,” Sears and Roebuck soberly informed us, then used the last of the hydrogen peroxide retros over the space of an hour to cut the ship's rotation, leaving us in an orbit that would take us directly into the planet's atmosphere . . . at about mach seventy (that's Earth sea-level, dry-air mach speed of seventy, about twenty-three kilometers per second).

Trying to land at such a speed would kill us as surely as blowing up the reactor pile. But we were
rapidly running out of options: when Sears and Roebuck killed the main thrusters, they did so with only a tiny bit of LOX remaining. “How much we got left?” Arlene asked.

“Approximately it is left 650 seconds is,” they answered, “but only at three gravities of Fredworld for using the maneuvers rockets.”

Arlene and I looked at each other; that was less than eleven minutes of burn, and without even using the huge main thrusters! Arlene tapped rapidly on her wrist calculator, frowned, and tried the calculation again. “S and R,” she said, broadcasting through her throat mike into the ship's radio communication system. “I get a net drop of about mach fifty.”

“That is correct in essential.”

Arlene lowered her orange brows and spoke slowly, like a child answering what she thinks might be a trick classroom question. “Sears and Roebuck, if we're doing mach seventy now, and we drop by mach fifty, doesn't that mean we're still doing mach twenty?”

“Yes. The math are simplicity.”

Now we both looked back and forth in confusion. I took over the interrogation, now that I understood the situation: “S and R, you braindead morons, we'll still be splattered across the deck like a boxload of metallic atoms!”

Long pause. Maybe they were manipulating each other's head in that faintly obscene form of laughter the Klave use. “No my childrens, but for we shall use air-braking to reduceify the rest of the speed.”

A terrible pit opened in my stomach. Even I knew that the Fred ship was not, repeat
not,
designed to be abused in such a fashion. It was designed to dock with a pinwheel launcher and even to land
gently
using the main thrusters to slow all the way to next to nothing . . . not to belly-flop into the atmosphere like a disoriented diver, burning off excess speed by turning its huge surface area directly into the onrushing air!

We would burn to a crisp. That is, if the ship didn't tear itself into constituent parts first. “Hang on to yourselves and things,” suggested our mondo-weird, binary pilots. “We're burning away the fuel starting now.”

T
he ship jerked, shimmied like a garden hose, jerked again. “Where the hell's that crazy mofo?” I demanded.

Arlene was knocked away from her perch by another sudden “earthquake.” I caught her by the arm, so she didn't carom across the zero-g ship. “Christ! I think he said he was headed toward Nav Room One, right inside the engine compartment!” The ship twirled like a chandelier, or so it felt; we dangled from handholds, feeling sudden acceleration trying to yank us free to fling us into God knows where. Nearly eleven minutes later, the acceleration vanished as abruptly as it began. Sears and Roebuck finished the final burn. We were dead-sticking it the rest of the way in, and that would be the end of the Fred ship—and possibly of us, too.

Then the atmosphere thickened enough that we started feeling a real push; the bow of the ship became “down,” the stern “up.” I drifted against the for'ard bulkhead, now floor, with about 0.2 g, which quickly escalated to full, then more than full gravity. Two, three times our normal g! The inertial dampers were offline, probably out of juice; we suffered through the full deceleration phase. Four g's, four and a half.

The air-braking went on forever. I was crushed to the deck by about eight hundred pounds of weight! Then the gravity began to slide along the deck toward the ventral bulkhead. Sears and Roebuck were pitching the nose upward to expose more of the hull to the atmosphere.

We shed airspeed even as we gained more weight. I heard a horrific explosion astern of us—the ship swerved violently, hurling us across the new floor! Arlene fell against me, but I was stunned. I shook my head. “What the freaking hell—!”

She stared out a porthole, face ashen. “Jesus, Fly! Freakin' ship splitting!” She slid her hand along the deck and pointed. I just barely saw a huge piece of the Fred ship below us, tumbling end over end, shattering into “tiny” splinters scores of meters long.

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.

“L
ivable?” 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 probably 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.