Endgame (9 page)

If he was even still a him, or a Newbie, for that
matter, what weird mutation had he undergone this time? I shuddered at the horrific, Hieronymus Bosch images conjured up by my mind.

Then abruptly the ship's “gravity,” the acceleration toward the outside hull, shifted radically. Suddenly,
down
was not just out but forward as well. Only one event could have caused that effect . . . and it meant we had found our elusive gremlin, sort of: “Criminentalies, he's made his way to another set of nav controls!” I shouted in Arlene's ear; he was slowing us down or turning us, driving us away from Skinwalker and sabotaging the mission!

This Newbie had evolved an independent personality . . . and he was determined not to risk contact with the tribe, no matter what the cost to the rest of the galaxy.

“C
hrist, S and R—do something!” Having issued my first military command in a week, I did what any good military man does when confronted with an invisible enemy: I ran in circles, screaming and shouting. Sears and Roebuck looked frustrated, being constitutionally unable to follow the order “do something.”

Then Arlene, whirling rapidly in every direction with her magazine-fed shotgun, thought of the obvious: “Fly! Isn't this stupid Fred ship steered by consensus?”

“Yes! I don't know what that means!”

“Maybe S and R should hump over to another nav center and issue another vote for
our
course!”

Sears and Roebuck started to run, but I grabbed one of their arms. “Wait—before you go, set up a computer loop that continually issues the command to get us back on course . . . run from nav to nav, setting up the same order wherever you can. Go!”

I gestured Arlene to me. “Okay, Lance, you and I are going hunting.” She licked her lips; sometimes that girl is just a little
too
Marine.

The gravity stopped, then reversed; we had outvoted the Newbie. But while we broke out into one of the outer corridors and ran the length of the ship, the situation reversed, and again we started slowing. The damned Newbie was doing the same thing we were!

“Arlene—how many navigational centers?”

“Um . . . forty-one that I counted.”

“Corporal, that thing has evolved intelligence beyond ours. We can't outthink him, so there's only one thing to do: we have to drag him down to our level by attacking without thought or planning, purely chance encounters and brute force.”

We bolted through corridors lit only by our own flashes, dashing from nav to nav at random—random as a human brain can do—desperately hoping to catch the Newbie as
he
visited nav after nav. We ran into Sears and Roebuck—twice! But the Newbie remained as elusive as ever.

The third time we bumped into the Klave and nearly blew them away, I had had enough. “Screw it, A.S.—just start pounding a shell into each nav center as we find it.”

It was time to reduce the choices. We went methodically from center to center, and in every room, Arlene raised her semi-auto shotgun and pumped three or four shells into the delicate programming equipment. Everywhere we went, we tripped over dead Freds that we didn't even remember killing (and
hadn't got around to dumping), so intense had been that firefight when we took over the ship.

We had destroyed more than half the navs and had been hurled to the ground a dozen times by radical acceleration changes when we finally kicked a door and saw our enemy. The Newbie had his head buried in the guts of one of the destroyed navs, trying to repair it enough to cast another vote for slow-down. He jerked his new triple-heads up as we entered; his tentacle-arm snaked down the circuitry, bypassing the damage.

“There is no need for violence,” one of the heads said, speaking in calm, measured tones. “We must join forces against the Freds. The Newbies have decided they cannot coexist with the Deconstructionists. If you continue on the present course, we will be wiped out by the Newbies, who have their own agenda. Please, just listen to us!”

He started to make a whole lot of sense. Arlene lowered her shotgun hesitantly, waiting to hear him out.

So I shot the frigging bastard before he could utter another syllable. I raised my M-14 and squeezed off a burst of four, the big rifle kicking against my shoulder like a Missouri mule, disemboweling the Newbie where he stood. Arlene stared. “Jesus, Fly” was all she said, her voice tentative and questioning.

The Newbie staggered back against a hydraulic pump—God only knows what use the Freds had for hydraulics in a spaceship—but it didn't clutch its belly or moan or gasp “ya got me!” or anything. It bled, the blood being pinkish white, like pale Pepto-Bismol.

A bulge started in his side. I understood immediately—it was evolving more organs to relink around the damage! I blasted them, too, and at last the damned thing truly died . . . as nearly dead as the living dead ever could be. It bubbled softly, leaning back against a bulkhead, then nothing.

Yeah, but I'd seen that act before. I unloaded the rest of the magazine into him, hitting every major biological system I could imagine. I guess maybe I went a little overkill; but, criminey,
what else could I do?

“A.S.,” I explained guiltily, “he was getting under our skin. I
had
to do it! If I'd have let him speak, Lance, he would have had us eating his solid waste in five minutes flat.”

“I . . . understand, but—
Jesus,
Fly!”

The Newbie slid slowly to the ground, staring at me with such intensity I almost reloaded and shot another burst into its face, just to shut those eyes! I didn't. But for the first time, I really understood the protagonist of Poe's “The Telltale Heart.” He turned his head to the side, staring down at the deck. I think he was already “dead,” unable to control his neck and eye muscles, but I still know he saw what he saw. They all did.

“Jesus was a man of action, Corporal.” I was getting a bit offended at her taking of the Lord's name in vain. Maybe I was just a bit worried that Jesus might not have liked what I had just done. “I had no choice . . . his tongue was silver!”

She just stared, shaking her head. The ship continued to accelerate back to cruising speed, giving us two “down” directions: outboard and aft. I felt sick, but I didn't know whether it was from the weird “gravity” or being sick at heart about what I had just done—blown away the only representative we had met from an entirely new alien species.

We found Sears and Roebuck and told them they could stop programming navigational centers. We were alone. The Newbie's ghost could join that of Rumplestiltskin and every other dead Fred on board. We picked up the creature's body, bearing him aft to the “bridge,” just about midway along the ship's body; actually, this bridge was just one among many. We set him up in the co-pilot's chair, where the Fred
captain had been slain. Enemies in battle, they could become fast allies guiding the ship of death with spectral hands. The Newbie weighed more than I would have expected, about twice what Arlene weighed. I wished the nav cabins were closer to the central core of the ship, so we wouldn't have to lug the dead thing through nearly a full g of acceleration. This marked the
second
time in living memory when Fly Taggart ever wished for zero-g!

We ramped up to speed again, but the monkeying around had cost us ten days of travel and a dreadful amount of fuel. I didn't understand how two hours of space-jockeying could cost us ten days until Arlene explained the fuel problem. The fuel was calculated on two assisted accelerations: ramping up at the beginning of the journey, after being launched by the pinwheel launcher from Fredworld, and slowing down at the end all by our lonesome.

I mostly nodded and said “uh-huh” whenever she paused to wait for my response. I was really only interested in one aspect, which she finally disgorged. The ramscoop only worked at a certain speed, and you had to accelerate to that speed by other means . . . hence, the hydrogen and liquid oxygen fuel we carried. The hydrogen was no problem; the ship replenished the store as a byproduct of fusion—I guess not all the hydrogen fused, or something. But the LOX, as Arlene called it, was irreplaceable—once it was gone, it was gone.

The bastard Newbie had used a lot of it trying to slow us down. We didn't have enough left to do a hundred-g burn for three days and match orbits with Skinwalker. We would have to start slowing a subjective week earlier by shutting down the ramjet fusion entirely and just letting the friction of interstellar hydrogen against the ramscoop slow us some. Then we would
manually
burn at lower thrust, conserving our fuel and
hopefully
matching velocities. . . . If not,
we either would stop short, dead in space, drifting at whatever velocity relative to the planet we finally ran out of fuel, sailing on past the planet and waving bye-bye in the rear windshield—or else we might plow into the hunk of rock at a couple of hundred kilometers per second, punching out a crater the size of the Gulf of Mexico and, incidentally, atomizing us and the ship.

It all depended on Sears and Roebuck. Arlene and I offered to help—we told them about our brilliant piloting of the makeshift mail-rocket coming down from the relocated Deimos moon to Earth's surface—but the Klave just looked at each other, each putting his gorilla-size hand on the other's head, and pumped their crania up and down. We took it to be laughter that time—derisive laughter.

I had no idea how good a pilot Sears and Roebuck were, but I had a bad feeling it was like the President taking the stick of Air Force One when the pilot has a heart attack. Better than giving it to the presidential janitor, though, which was basically where Arlene and I stood in the pecking order. God, how I wished we hadn't left Commander Taylor back at the Hyperrealist military base! That babe could fly anything.

The other big problem was that unlike back at Fredworld, we had no friendly pinwheel launcher to catch us here and lower us more or less gently to the surface. We were entirely on our own.

The rest of the journey was uneventful, including the extra ten days of grace. We trained and practiced various emergency drills, just for something to do: one of the biggest problems with spaceflight is the incredible, relentless boredom, but if there's one thing the Marine Corps teaches you to handle, it's ennui. We were always sitting on our hands, waiting for somebody further up the food chain to finish a mysterious errand, while the rest of us jarheads, men with stripes on our sleeves, waited for The Word.

It wasn't like they let any grass grow under our feet. There's always something to do around a military base, even if it's just putting a nice polish on the brass cannon on the stone steps at Pensacola (or scrubbing the base CO's hardwood office floor with toothbrushes). If you manage to “miss” your gunny or your top, you might find yourself with a whole afternoon free, but there was always the NCO club to soak up any extra dollars.

On the Fred ship, it was both more and less difficult to find something to do for weeks and weeks—harder because there weren't any butterbars, silverbells, or railroad tracks to
tell us
what to do, but easier because we were on
an alien space ship
full of strange and wonderful things to poke and monkey with, three main corridors of 3.7 kilometers each at 0.8 g and one at zero-g.

I actually learned to tolerate zero-g for several hours at a time with only a slight floaty feeling in my stomach. Arlene loved it, naturally. The central shaft that I called the zero-g corridor was dodecahedral, according to A.S.—it had twelve sides. But the corners weren't sharp, they were rounded off, and the sides were not very symmetrical in any case. Like everything else in Fredland, the entire corridor disoriented me, like looking at one of those paintings by Picasso where the eyes are head-on, but the nose is in profile. There was a totally cool red pulse that traveled the length of the shaft—from back to front, oddly enough—that reminded me so much of an old sci-fi flick that we dubbed it the Warp Coil Pulse. The walls must have been light panels or LEDs or something; I don't know where the illumination came from . . . there was no source that we ever found.

We invented a few reindeer games to play when we got tired of training, marching, and drilling. (I made sure Arlene and I kept up on our parade and close-order drill; we may have been lost in space, but we
were still the United States Freaking Marine Corps, Goddamn it!) One Arlene got from an old sci-fi book by Heinlein: you start at one end of the corridor and “dive” toward the other end, doing flips or spins or butterflies or some other gymnastic feat, seeing how far you can get and how many maneuvers you can perform before you crash against the side. She never did get all the way, but after the first couple of weeks, I always did, much to Arlene's annoyance.

I thought Sears and Roebuck would be too staid and respectable to join in any reindeer games. Hah! They were always the first to get tired of the milspec crap and demand we go play. I guess decadence is more than anything else the need to play games to drive away the boredom demon.

Having demonstrated their insanity by volunteering to go on our expedition, far from any possibility of resurrection if they should “die,” Sears and Roebuck proved their fearlessness in the risks they would take just for a thrill. Once, they put on space suits from their fanny packs, climbed outside the ship, and played like monkeys on the outer skin! They dangled from the spinning hull, swinging from handhold to handhold with their feet dangling over an infinite abyss—one slip, and we would have lost one, if not both, of our pilots. Probably if one had gone, the other would have been unable to contemplate living and would have followed the first loyally to a horrible doom.

But all good things must end. The time rolled by at last, and Sears and Roebuck suddenly turned deadly serious. We shut down the ramscoop, and I felt a slight gravity push for'ard as we plowed into interstellar hydrogen-dust and slowed. We did this for about a week, then Sears and Roebuck started the thrusters at a lower and more efficient level of acceleration than what our ship originally had planned. It made no difference to us; it was still far beyond the
fatal crushing level, so the inertial dampers kept it down to the same level we had felt ramping up. Our reindeer games stopped; we had no more zero-g shaft.