Endgame (23 page)

It was a hell of a thing for her to do, one of the reasons I love her so much, my best bud. Now . . . what did this mean, now we had Pfc. Wilhelm Dodd
as one of our crew? But a Dodd who not only didn't remember sleeping with Arlene and loving her,
but also didn't remember being killed by her.
But Arlene remembered, God help her. She remembered killing her boyfriend. She blew his head off and watched the body topple like a dead tree.

“Christ,” she muttered beneath her breath, closing her eyes and turning away. “Christ, Fly. Did you have to run into . . . into him?”

I didn't know whether Albert made it easier or harder. She had thought she loved Dodd until she met Albert Gallatin. But maybe her feelings for Albert were colored by what she'd done to Dodd, and what we all were sharing: the destruction of our planet and our entire race. At least, I knew those thoughts were firing through her brain; if I could think them with my limited mental capacity for speculation, sure as hell Arlene was obsessing about them herself.

She swallowed the emotions down and became a Marine again. Dodd wasn't Dodd; he was a zombie . . . and now a platoon member. She did what she had to do. She was a U.S. Marine
—semper fi,
Mac.

The spiney imps got busy ripping away at the masonry; Arlene and I tried to help, but human hands simply weren't strong enough to do the dirty work. We caught stones as they fell and lugged them away, trying to make as little noise as possible; the pinkies were damned noisy as a rule, and the hell princes should be used to the noise . . . but still, the last thing I wanted—

We almost, damn near made it. Slink and the other spineys—Whack, Swaller, Sniff and Chomp—used their iron nails to grind away at the crack, scraping stone away. It was already wide enough for me and Arlene (and Dodd, of course), and nearly so for the imps, but the pumpkin Olestradamus was a big problem: I snapped my fingers until I got his—her?—attention and gestured it over. “Can you deflate?” I asked. It didn't say anything but looked puzzled.
“I mean, is there any way you can suck in a little at the sides, like, and squeeze through that crack?”

Olestradamus floated closer to the hole and stared through it. The pumpkin had not yet spoken; I only knew I had converted it by the fact that it no longer opened its mouth and spat lightning balls at me.

This is how the scene happened: we'd been battling the pumpkin in a small room, Slink and Chomp and I, taking cover behind a stone couch built for some gigantic monster with a really hard butt. While the pumpkin floated to each corner of the room, firing lightning balls at us from every conceivable angle, we screamed out our spiel about the simulation. I almost bit my tongue in half when Slink shouted out, “Masssster sshall produce miracle! Then you sshall know!” It wasn't exactly like I could just close my eyes and envision a vase of flowers appearing in the middle of the room! What was I supposed to do, suddenly “remember” that the water in the fountain was really wine?

Sure, kid, sure, that would be great . . . only it didn't work that way. I couldn't “remember” something so totally different because my
real
memory got in the way. Maybe if I were one of Arlene's religious teachers, the ones she was forever reading about—Bodhisatvas, something like that—maybe I could perfectly visualize a Fredworld where pumpkins were only beachballs, imps were crash-test dummies, and the pinkies all wore monkey suits and served cocktails.

But I was just Flynn Taggart, and I had too good a memory to play that game. Alas, I remembered just how bad-tempered the pumpkins were . . . and this one was proving how damned good my memory was with every electrical belch. I wished that somehow Sears and Roebuck had been transferred with me; I sure could have used those gigantic Magilla Gorilla arms to pop that overinflated monster.

And then an astonishing thing happened. While
the pumpkin was floating around the blue-glowing room, with flickering light from several shredded light tubes, it managed to wedge itself into the small space between the stone couch and a shred of illuminating panel on the ceiling. Trying to extricate itself, the pumpkin managed to rotate so that its mouth was pointed directly skyward.

Then, in frustration, seeing us in the corner of its peripheral vision, so close, touching distance—the dweebie pumpkin fired a round . . . directly up into the powerful circuitry. The short-circuit in the light tube must have acted like a capacitor, because there was a violent spark-flinging feedback loop, and the pumpkin ended up taking a jolt that must have been a hundred times the amperage of its own lightning, judging by the acrid smell of ozone.

The zap scrambled every neural circuit in the pumpkin's brain. It must have blown through all of its metaprogramming, letting me reach right down into the deepest part of its brain and convert it on the spot—like it had seen God directly, that's how it responded. I turned it, we became friends. Turns out the things can talk, they just don't have much to say (too full of hot air, hah hah). Their voices are at the extreme low end of the frequency range of a human ear. Olestradamus sounded like Darth Vader played on a tape running half-speed.

But now I waited expectantly for Olestradamus to answer. After a long moment staring out the crack, it rotated to face us and sadly said, “N-n-no. C-c-c-annn-not fit.” I wondered if I had the only pumpkin who stuttered, or if that were a racial characteristic of all pumpkins.

Olestradamus rotated to return to its post and froze: standing in the doorway was a hell prince. The freaking thing had
finally
decided to go upstairs and check on the weird silence . . . and with amazing foresight, it had chosen the exact instant that the door was unguarded!

The hell prince recovered before I did. It raised its arm and fired a blast of the greenish energy beam from a wrist launcher. But Olestradamus was faster! I wouldn't have believed it possible; I'd never seen a pumpkin move so quickly. But it was in between us and the hell prince fast enough to catch the blow meant for Arlene.

Olestradamus screamed in rage and pain, and returned fire with the lightning balls. I turned back to Arlene. “Move your gorgeous ass, A.S.!” Unceremoniously, I grabbed her by the butt and scruff of the neck and propelled her through the hole, dumping her face-first a dozen feet down into what sounded like squishy mud.

“Slink, Whack, Chomp, Dodd—punch it, through the gap!”

My apostles squeezed through the gap, which was
almost
wide enough for a spiney, and followed Arlene to the ground. I hoped to hell she had shaken off enough daze to roll out of the way before the two-hundred-kilogram spineys dropped on her head.

I leveled my shotgun, we were at such close quarters, and tried to get a shot around Olestradamus, but the pumpkin was too fat, too round! It and the hell prince were going at it—well, I was going to say fang and claw, but I guess it was actually mouth and wrist launcher. God, but the two races must have hated each other. But why? I remembered seeing hell-prince bodies lining the walls of one pumpkin chamber and dead deflated pumpkins strewn about the floor of another hall owned by hell princes. I guessed the only two creatures that hated each other more were steam demons and the spidermind.

They were both pretty torn up. Olestradamus blocked the entire passageway, and the hell prince effectively filled the doorway, which was a good thing, because I could just glimpse the second hell prince behind the first—but he couldn't get off a shot around his compatriot.

“Come on, forget it!” I bellowed. “We're through. . . . Pull back and hide—convert your brothers!” But Olestradamus didn't hear; it was too busy teaching its mortal enemy what it meant to incur the wrath of a pumpkin.

And then I heard the sound I most dreaded: the flatulent noise of an inflated pumpkin popping, meeting its airy doom. Olestradamus collapsed into a huddled heap of rubbery flesh on the floor. It belched no more lightning.

We had our first martyr on the holy quest to punish the false ones.

I stepped back into the shadows of the crack. The stupid hell prince had gotten so fixated on killing its race enemy that it had entirely forgotten about me and the rest of the crew. It staggered forward, obviously ninety percent dead on its feet.

I was happy to supply the missing tenth. As it crouched unsteadily over the body of our loving Olestradamus, the most intelligent inflated floater I had ever known, I raised my duck gun and unloaded a shell at point-blank range into the hell prince's temple. I only wished I still had the beloved double-barreled shotgun I had carried through the entire campaign on Earth.

I guess Olestradamus must have torn up the hell prince more than I thought. I expected the creature to be hurt; but hell, one just like it had taken a shot directly amidships with a
rocket
, for Pete's sake, and lived. But this one didn't; it dropped heavily, groaning . . . and ten seconds later, it was dead, green blood and gooshie brain goo dribbling out its head.

The other came charging out, but it was too late; I stepped back once more, launching myself through the crack and down about five meters to the wet peat below. I fell hard, stunning myself. As I came back to consciousness a moment later, I found I had made a giant-size mud angel.

The hell prince stood at the crack and tried to fire through it, but we ran under the overhanging piece of building, completely unhittable. Thank the devil our intrepid imps
hadn't
made the hole any bigger; the hell prince was only just barely too big to fit.

Arlene steadied me, and I told the crew what had happened to poor Olestradamus. Arlene made the same point about him, her, it being a martyr, and I explained the concept to Slink for later processing to the other apostles.

Above us was
sky,
horribly enough; we had come down more than two kilometers through the solid rock of Phobos . . . and here, at the bottom, directly overhead we saw the stars! It made no geographic sense, but, of course, it didn't have to—it was nothing but computer software, after all.

Across the field, I saw the raised platform that was the Gate. I pointed. “Well, men, I hate to say it, but if we're going to find that power source, we'd better get the hell off Phobos.”

Arlene raised her eyebrows, then shrugged. “Well,
sayonara,
Phobos. And I was
so
looking forward to a more extended visit.”

Yeah, right, A.S.

M
arines are like cats. They sleep lightly, half an eye peeled for charlie, sniffing the air like a huge carnivorous tiger that's always hungry. They can fall asleep standing up, in zero-g, during reentry, even
while marching on the flipping parade ground. Don't ever try to sneak up on a Marine; Jesus the Anointed One walking on the water makes enough racket to jerk a Marine awake from a sound sleep. And when a Marine wakes up, he's on his feet in one fluid movement, rifle in hand, fully alert in less time than the fastest microprocessor takes to execute a single machine-code command.

Except me, that is. Fly Taggart wakes up not remembering his own name, bleary and groggy, eyelids glued shut with little pieces of sleep. I stagger like one of the Fred-worked zombies with a mouth full of cotton, inarticulately begging and pleading for some life-giving coffee. Usually it takes two recruits and a burly Pfc. to slap some sense into me in the morning.

This time, it took a scared lance corporal. Arlene snapped me out of my coma by the simplest possible means: she started kicking me in the ribs, gently at first, getting harder and harder, until at last I blindly reached out a meaty ham-fist and caught her ankle in mid-kick. Without waking more than halfway, I jerked her off her feet and snarled something about not tickling a man when he's trying to get some Z's.

Then I blinked awake. I sat up on a blue-specked dirt patch overgrown with clumps of sharp, brittle, blue grass that seemed to undulate, though I couldn't quite tell for sure. Arlene picked herself up, brushing the dirt from her uniform and rubbing her knee. “Damn you, Sarge!” she stage-whispered. “I was just trying to get up quietly.”

Taking my cue from the lance corporal, I kept my own voice low. “What the hell is going on? Last thing I remember, I was strapped to a table and the Newbies were trying to suck my brains out with a vacuum cleaner.”

I stared around. Arlene and I sat atop a small hill that faintly rippled. In the distance, I saw the human-built ship, the
Disrespect to Death-Bringing Deconstructionists.
It was even smaller than I imagined,
utterly dwarfed by my memory of the Fred ship. I would still love to see them side by side, though. The
Disrespect
looked far sleeker and more elegant.

In all other directions was a flat plain, broken only by immensely tall thin trees. They swayed so easily, though, in the faintest air current, that maybe they were just very tall grass.

Blue was the color of the day. I knew for a fact that the desert we had walked across from the Fred ship was brownish gray, with not a trace of blue. I bent down and looked close at the ground: the blue specks that colored the entire terrain were actually tiny bugs! Almost microscopic insects swarming over everything—over me and Arlene, even. I cringed for a moment; I've always hated bugs. But there wasn't anything I could do about it, and I didn't feel any pain. Alas, even Ninepin had deserted us. I had no idea where he had got to, but he was gone, the inadvertent little traitor.

“Arlene—”

“Yeah, I know. You can't even brush 'em off; they're too small. I figure they must eat microbes, so maybe they're not all bad.”

“Arlene, where the hell are we?”

She shrugged. The blue critters in her bright red hair turned her head purple. “Near as I can deduce, Fly, the Resuscitators tried to suck our souls out; my nose still hurts like hell.”