Endgame (8 page)

I tried to think of a subtle way of asking what the hell was going on, but Arlene beat me to the line, demanding, “How the hell did you grow a tentacle out of your gut?”

The Newbie looked down in obvious surprise. “We aren't sure what event has stimulated this growth.”

“It'll come to you, I'm sure,” I muttered, “but we're not
quite
finished considering your information. Please excuse us.”

The Newbie became rigid again, and its vital signs dropped away to zero. I stepped back and spoke for Arlene's ears only—presuming that the Newbie hadn't evolved super-sensitive hearing in the last five minutes. “We are in deep, deep kimchee, kiddo.”

She looked up and down. “Oh, come on; we can still take it.” Her red brows furrowed, then raised. “Oh! You mean we Earthlings? Yeep, I hadn't even thought of that. Damn.”

Newbies, hundreds of millions of Newbies, scouring the galaxy looking for races to “fix,” evolving so rapidly that they were a whole different species from one battle to the next. Newbies with a violent streak sufficient to
wipe the Freds
from the face of their home planet. Newbies discovering the embryonic human race, just beginning to poke our noses into the intergalactic fray—these were frightening thoughts. Arlene grimaced and absently tugged at her ear, following her own agitated turn of thought.

“Fly, we have to find them. We have to find out which way they're headed and warn Earth.”

“What
is
Earth by now? Maybe we deserve wiping out . . . who knows?”

Now she turned the brunt of her blue-eyed, icy anger on me. “I don't think I follow you—Sergeant.”

“Just thinking out loud; don't pay any attention. Course we're going to warn the country, or what's left of it, whoever's in charge. I just wonder; it's been two hundred odd years back home; it'll have been another two centuries before we can get back, maybe longer, depending on where the Newbies lead us. I just wonder whether there's still anything left worth warning.”

I didn't know how much of the conversation Sears and Roebuck had heard—little, I hoped. I stepped forward and spoke aloud, rousing the Newbie. “Newbies, attention please. Take us to your—to the rest of you, please. Can you do that?”

It opened its eyes and spoke but did not otherwise move. “We can take you to us if we have not changed our plan for exploration. We are going to [unintelligible], but we do not know where we will go from there.”

“If we leave now,” Arlene whispered in my ear, “we'll still arrive about forty years after the Newbies arrived, no matter where it is.”

“Can you give—ah, the Klave bearing and distance to your location?”

The Newbie turned to Sears and Roebuck and spoke in a different language. And the latter responded in the same tongue! Arlene and I stared at each other; when had the Newbie learned to speak Klavish? Then she rolled her eyes and solved the mystery: “Learned it from the Freds, of course.” It probably wasn't Klavish, actually, just some common language the two sides, the Hyperrealists and the Deconstructionists, used for interparty negotiation.

Sears and Roebuck turned back to the local navigational system. Evidently, in the absence of conflicting orders from any other section of the ship, any one station was sufficient to pilot the entire vessel. “Voyage taking us another eight of weeks, it will,” announced the pair of Klave. “External times in the hundred and twenty of years.”

Eight more long weeks . . . God, just what I wanted. I took a deep breath. “Push the button, Max,” I said. Arlene gave me a swift kick in the ankle.

The lift sequence was bizarre. It took a full day, much of which was a carefully calculated refueling that the ship carried out automatically after Sears and Roebuck programmed the course. Arlene interrogated the Klave extensively on just how the launch itself worked, then briefed me, like a good junior NCO.

On their homeworld, the Freds used something Arlene called a “pinwheel launcher,” which she described as a huge asterisk in orbit around the planet. Each limb of the asterisk was a boom with a hook attached; the diameter of the asterisk, counting the booms, was something on the order of
seven thousand kilometers!

The whole pinwheel affair rotated directly opposite the day-night rotation of the planet. The spokes of the pinwheel descended from the sky and just kissed the ground; at that precise point, ground and boom were moving exactly the same speed and direction . . . so from the viewpoint of a ship on the runway—our ship—the boom appeared to hesitate motionless for a moment.

That was the moment that our ship attached itself to the boom; in that fraction of a second, the Fred ship transformed itself from being a member of the Fredworld system to a member of the pinwheel system. Then, as the pinwheel continued to rotate, it pulled our ship up with it . . . gently at first; it felt like zero-g for a few minutes. Then we felt the centrifugal
tug as we were yanked in a different direction than the planetary rotation.

The g force increased rapidly, then just as suddenly, it decreased as the inertial dampers kicked online. Still, my stomach flew south while the rest of me went north, and I longed for the comfortable, familiar disorientation of mere zero-g! That was a first, I was absolutely convinced—Fly Taggart longing for free-fall!

The pinwheel carried us up and around, then at perigee, the highest point of our little mini-orbit around the center of mass of the rotating asterisk, the ship decoupled, launching us into space. We were once again at freefall, and I regretted my earlier wish for it. But the ship immediately started spinning up, eventually hitting 0.8 g again. Meanwhile, the engines began to whine and moan and loudly groan, and we felt the hard backward push that indicated we had started our long acceleration, prior to the seven-week drift, culminating with the hard deceleration at the other end, dropping us into . . . into what?

It was a frightening thought. And we would have fifty-eight creeping days to think about it.

We fell into a standardized shipboard routine: training, mess, watchstanding, strategic mental improvement (we played chess and Go), and endless worrying, discussing, theorizing, emotional reminiscence of all that was best on Earth before this whole, horrible nightmare started. Once again, I took to walking the long, wet, slimy, hot corridors . . . but this time with Arlene at my side.

Everything we saw reminded us of the monsters the Freds created for us; they drew heavily from their own world. They loved dark alcoves, doors that opened suddenly with only a hiss for a warning; I couldn't count how many times I whirled around, drawing down on a frigging door!

Horrible bas-relief faces adorned every flat surface.
Then, right in the middle of a passageway on a space ship, for Pete's sake, we'd run into a fountain of some dark red fluid that sure as hell looked like blood.

The walls never seemed quite straight. Maybe straight lines and right-angle turns bothered the Freds as much as the crazy geometry set my neck hairs upright. “Take a look,” Arlene said, pointing at a door through which we had to pass.

I sucked in a breath. “The mouth of
Moloch?
Jesus, Albert should be here.”

I looked sharply over at her, but she wasn't torqued by the reference to her once and only. She nodded slowly. “Albert would have loved this spread.” That was Arlene Sanders: her response to grief and fear was literary irony. A perfect Marine.

Jesus, I felt homesick. Just a few months ago—my time—I was wasting my life at Camp Pendleton, loafing and pulling the occasional watch, thinking of not reupping and dropping back into the world instead. I had a fiancée, now deceased; I had parents and high-school friends; I had the expectation that the world would look pretty much the same twenty years later. Then we got sent to Kefiristan, but even that was all right; it was crap, but it was the crap I'd always known was possible in my chosen profession.

But when they yanked us out of the Pearl Triangle and boosted Fox Company up to Phobos . . . well, they yanked me out of my comfortable reality and threw me into primordial chaos. So now I was jogging the length and circumference of an alien spaceship, hurling toward an unknown star at nearly lightspeed, with a plural alien as ally and a mutable thing for a guide; the only constancy was Arlene Sanders, now my last and only friend.

It's not just a job, man, it's an adventure.

The weeks crawled past like worms on a wet sidewalk. Every few days, the Newbie mutated, evolved, whatever you call it, slowly transforming from the
roughly humanoid shape we first found into a truly alien form with a distended stomach, a pushed-in jaw, and longer arms. I found the change fascinating and a little scary; who was to say it
wouldn't
evolve into something we couldn't handle?

But a queer thing happened: the closer we got to the planetary system, which we nicknamed Skinwalker because it was where we would find the shape-shifters, the more frightened the Newbie became. He was scared, terrified!

I asked what he was so frightened of, and he answered, “We are subject to different stimulae; we are frightened of how we have grown to adapt to the native circumstances.”

“You're scared you're no longer the same species!” I accused. The Newbie said nothing, going limp again—its usual response to information it could not handle. Of course it couldn't. . . . I had just suggested that unity was bifurcated, that what had been one was now two! The Newbie had no words inside its head to explain that concept: it conceived of itself as everything and nothing . . . all of the Newbie species at once and nothing of itself. How can you divide “everything” into
two
piles, one of which is still labeled “everything”?

The Newbie was starting to realize that whatever was waiting for us on Skinwalker was not the Newbie race—not anymore. It was terrified of what its own people had become, just as Arlene and I were terrified of what Earth would look like when we finally returned.

We hawk-watched the Newbie for the first couple of weeks, but it never did anything but sit on the table, unmoving, and answer questions we asked it. It never initiated conversations or tried to move. We surveilled it, watching through an air-circulation grate to see what it did when it thought no one was around; either it didn't do anything or else it knew somehow that we were there. Sears and Roebuck told me that
there was a hidden video system aboard the ship, used by the captain to spy on the rest of his crew, but we couldn't find it, and we had thrown most of the Freds overboard on Fredworld, so we couldn't revive the captain to tell us himself . . . even if that idea weren't so utterly stupid that I wouldn't even mention it to my lance.

Gradually, we came to accept the immobile, silent alien in the sickbay, then we started even to forget he was there at all. I found myself and Arlene casually talking in front of him about stuff he really wasn't cleared to hear. After all, he
was
still the representative of the enemy, even if he and they had evolved in separate directions for forty years, which was the equivalent of possibly forty
million
dog years.

Five weeks into the eight-week voyage, Arlene experienced every Marine's worst nightmare: something terrible happened on her watch. The first I knew about it was three hours later, when she shook me awake out of a fitful sleep, where I dreamed we landed in a sea that turned out to be one, humongous Newbie circling the planet, waiting to fold us gently in arms like mountains and drag us to a watery grave fifty fathoms down. “Get up, get up, Fly,” she said urgently. “Battle stations!” In an eyeblink, I was out of bed, stark naked, with a .40-cal pistol in my hands.

“What? Where?” I demanded, looking for the enemy. We were alone in the room we called the barracks; even Sears and Roebuck were missing, though they'd been there when I went to sleep.

“Fly, I screwed the pooch. Real bad.” She looked so pale and stricken that I almost reached out to hug her. It wouldn't have been appreciated; there were times she was a friend and times she was a Marine Corps Lance Corporal.

“What did you do, Lance?”

Her face took on
the mask,
what we wear when we
have to go report a dereliction of duty (our own) to the XO: stone cold and icy white, lips as taut as strings stretched to their breaking point. “Sergeant, I was on watch at 0322; I went to check on the prisoner in sickbay, but he was gone.”

It took a moment for the intel to sink in. “Gone? What the hell do you mean? Where did he go?” I glanced at my watch, the only thing I wore: 0745. The Newbie had been missing for at least four hours and twenty minutes.

“I can't find him, Sarge. I've looked . . . Sears and Roebuck and I have crawled this entire freaking ship up one side and down the other, and we can't find a shred of evidence that he was ever here!”

“Where are the Klave?”

“They're still looking, but I think if we were going to find the Newbie, we'd have found traces at least by now.” She lowered her voice and looked truly ashamed; it was the first time I had ever seen her like that, and I didn't like it. “I think he's, ah, been planning this break for a long, long time—weeks, probably.”

I pulled on my cammies, T-shirt, and jacket while she talked. “God, Arlene, you're asking me to believe that the Newbie sat utterly still without moving for
five weeks,
just to lull us into a false sense of security! Christ, do you realize how ridiculous that sounds?”

“It's what he did, Fly. I just know it.”

We conducted a rigorous search, but, of course, if the person being sought doesn't want to be found, it's not difficult to avoid four people—well, three actually, since Sears and Roebuck are inseparable by nature—on a ship with fifty square kilometers of deckspace. We finally gave in to exhaustion at 1310 after more than five hours of continuous searching. The son of a bitch didn't want to be found, and by God we weren't going to find him.