Hell on Earth

To Gail Higgins
for help at the penultimate hour

A
s we hit the roof of Deimos, I looked up.

The pressure dome was cracked. Of course. That made sense, the way things had been going. Next thing you knew, thousand-year-old Martians would come along and wink us out of existence.

Fly Taggart stared at the crack, and his eyes bugged out like a frog. I wish he knew a bit more physics; if I have one complaint about Fly, it's that he doesn't hold with higher education. The crack was small, and I could see it wasn't going to leak all the air out of the dome in the next few minutes. Days, more like; days, or even weeks. It's a
big
facility.

Then I looked past the crack and saw what that huge Marine corporal was really staring at:
we weren't orbiting Mars anymore!

The entire moon of Deimos had just taken a whirlwind tour of the solar system. I swallowed hard; we were staring at Earth.

“I . . . guess we know their invasion plans now,” I said, feeling the blood rush to my face.

Fly plucked at his uniform—Lieutenant Weems's
uniform, except he'd pulled off the butter bars—like it had suddenly started itching. “Well at least we stopped them,” he said.

“Look again, Fly.” The globe was flecked with bright pinpoints of light, flares of explosives millions of times more powerful, more hellish, than any we had ducked or lobbed back here on Deimos. I pointed to the obvious nuclear exchange blanketing our home, dumping like a few billion tons of radiation, fallout, and sheer explosive muscle on—on everyone we had ever known. “Looks like they've already invaded.”

Fly suddenly latched onto my arm with a vise grip of raging emotion. I tried to pry his steel hands loose, while he hollered in my ear. “It's not over, Arlene!” PFC Arlene Sanders, United States Marine Corps: that's me. “We've already proven who's tougher. We won't let it end like this!”

Right. Me and Fly and nothing but weapons, ammo, and a hand with some fingers on it. We were going to
jump
from LEO down to the surface of the Earth. Or maybe we'd drive the planetoid down and land it at Point Mugu. I guess you couldn't consider Deimos strictly a moon anymore, since it appeared to be mobile.

We were stuck a mere four hundred klicks from where we wanted to be: but that was four hundred kilometers
straight up.
What's more, we were flying around the Earth at something better than ten kilometers per second—not only would we have to jump down, we'd better do one hell of a big foot-drag to kill that orbital velocity.

And after that we'd solve Fermat's Last Theorem, simplify the tax code, and cure world hunger.

That last one was easy enough to fix. The problem wasn't that there wasn't enough food; it was just in
the wrong places and didn't last long enough. I once heard an old duffer say all we really needed was food irradiation, Seal-a-Meals, and a bunch of rocket mail tubes to plant the food in the center of the famine du jour.

Rocket mail tubes . . .

“Fly,” I shrieked, jumping up and down. “I know how to do it!”

“Do
what,
damn it?”

Could we do it? I did some fast, rule-of-thumb calculations: our mass versus that of a typical “care package” from Mars, the sort they sent up to the grunts like me serving on Deimos; the Earth's gravitational pull compared to that of Mars—it's harder to fly up and down off the Earth's surface than the Martian surface. Maybe . . . no, it
would
work!

Well, maybe.

“I know how to get us across to Earth, Fly. Did you know there's a maintenance shed for unmanned shipping rockets on this dump of a moon?”

“No,” he said suspiciously.

Of course he didn't. He was never stationed here, like I'd been. It was a garage where the motor-pool sergeant kept all the mail tubes, the shipping rockets. I had no idea why they were called “mail tubes”; we send our mail electronically, as the universe intended.

“A one-way ticket to Earth,” I summed up, trying to penetrate that thick skull of his. “If we can find any kind of ship, we go home and kick some zombie ass. Again.”

“All over again,” he breathed, catching my drift at last. “Well, hell, we're professionals at this now!”

We continued looking at the familiar blue-green sphere of Earth, as the unfamiliar white spots appeared and disappeared all over the globe. An old piece of advice floated up from deep in my memory:
DON'T LOOK DOWN! We gazed upon white clouds so beautiful that they reminded me of what we'd been fighting to save.

Were we too late? Part of me hoped so, a part that just wanted to sit down and rest.

We'd fought those damned, ugly monsters until we were too tired to fight—and now it was looking like we had to do it all over again.

All at once I noticed a sprinkling of the flares all over California, my home state. “Oh, God, Fly,” I said, my stomach contracting.

“Yeah. Terrible.” Jesus, couldn't my best bud think of anything stronger to say when Armageddon came to your hometown?

I shook my head. “You don't understand. That's not what I meant. I mean
I don't feel anything.”
I trembled as I spoke.

Fly put his arm around me; well, that was more like it. “It's all right,” he mumbled. “It's not what you think. There's nothing wrong with you. After what you've been through, you're just numb. Your brain is tired.”

I let my head rest on his shoulder. “So my mind is coming loose. What about body and soul?”

Right then and there I decided we needed a new word to describe the state after you've reached exhaustion but had to keep going on automatic pilot.

Wherever that state was, Fly and I had been there a long, long time.

I
put my arm around Arlene's shoulders, hoping she would understand it meant nothing but friendship. Oh don't be silly, Fly; of course she understands!

Where to begin? I was born at an early age, in a log cabin I helped my father build. I grew up, joined the
UnitedStatesMarineCorpsSir!
—went to fight “Scythe of Glory” Communist leftovers in Kefiristan, punched out the C.O., was banged up in the brig and sent to Mars with the rest of my jarhead buddies.

We up-shipped to Phobos, one of the moons of Mars—well, now the
only
moon of Mars—and discovered a boatload of aliens had invaded through the used-to-be-dormant “Gates,” long-range teleporters from . . . from where? From another planet, God knows where. Arlene and I battled our way into the depths of the Phobos facility of the Union Aerospace Corporation . . . who started the whole invasion, turns out, by monkeying with the Gates in the first place.

It all rolled downhill from there. We ended up on Deimos somehow—and I'm still not sure how
that
happened!—and duked our way up one side and down the other, killing more types of monsters than
you can shake a twelve-gauge at, finally ending up in a hyperspace tunnel . . . you'll have to ask Arlene Sanders (Exhibit A, the gal to my left) to explain what
that
is. But when we finally killed everything worth killing, we lucked into stopping the invasion cold. See previous report-from-the-front for full details.

In the end, we faced down the spidermind—the handy nickname chosen for the spider-shaped “mastermind” of the invasion, chosen by Bill Ritch,
requisat in pace,
a computer genius who helped us at the cost of his own life.

Right before defeating the spidermind, I'd thought there was nothing left in me. I was certain that I couldn't have continued without Arlene, a physical reminder of what we were fighting for, like old-time war propaganda. While she breathed, I had to breathe, and fight. Blame it on the genes. We'd had the strength to go on against hundreds of monsters. We weren't about to let a little thing like the laws of physics stop us now.

Arlene couldn't stop looking at California, so I gently led her away from the sight. “You know, Arlene, I feel really stupid that I didn't think of the shed; especially after using the rocket fuel to fry the friggin' spider.”

She blinked her eyes and rubbed them. I could tell she was trying not to cry. “That's why you need
me,
Flynn Peter Taggart.”

So we went spaceship shopping.

Of course, there was the little matter of adding to our personal armaments. We hadn't seen any monsters for a while. Maybe we neutralized all of them—but I wasn't about to count on it.

“Once, I was asked why I don't like to go out on the street without being armed,” I told Arlene.

“Must have been an idiot,” came the terse reply.
She'd regained her self-control, but she was still acting defensive. We were good friends, but that made it easier for her to be embarrassed in front of me.

“No, I wouldn't call her that,” I continued. “But she'd lived a protected life; never came up against the mother of all storms.”

“What's that?” Arlene wanted to know.

“Late-twentieth-century street slang for when the bad mother on your block decides it's time to teach you a lesson. At such times, it is advisable to carry an equalizer.”

“Like this?” Arlene asked, bending down to retrieve an AB-10 machine pistol, her personal fave. Every little bit helps.

“If my friend had one of those in her purse—” I began, but Arlene interrupted.

“Too long to get it out. I like to carry on my person.”

“Yeah, yeah. I was about to say if she had carried, she might be alive today.”

Arlene stopped rummaging through the contents of a UAC crate and looked up. “Oh, Fly, I'm sorry.”

“Sometimes you get the lesson only one time, and it's pass-fail.” I playfully poked the air in her direction. “Welcome back,” I said.

“What do you mean?” she asked, squinting at me the way she always did when I made her defensive.

“You can feel again, dear.”

“Oh,” she said, her body becoming more relaxed. “You're right. One person means something. Well, sometimes . . . if there aren't too many one persons.”

“One's real. There's the body on the floor. A million is just a statistic, no matter how much screaming the professional mourner does.”

She punched the air back at me. And she smiled. We didn't talk for a little while. We continued gathering
goodies en route to the shed. It didn't take long to locate; the good news was that it was large and apparently well-stocked. It would take days to go through all the crates and boxes; but if the labels on the outside were accurate, we'd discovered a much larger inventory of parts than I would have imagined necessary for Deimos Base.

The bad news was a complete absence of ships in any state of assembly. There was nothing to fly!

“Well jeez, I
thought
it was a great idea,” said Arlene. “Too bad it flopped.”

Somehow it seemed immoral to give up hope while standing inside Santa's workshop. I began examining some of the boxes while Arlene kicked one across the room; but that didn't bother me, she was never meant for the modern age she was born into. She'd have been more homey as a freebooter in the days of blood and iron, when one physically competent woman did enough in her lifetime to breed legends of lost, Amazonian races of warrior queens. She had guts; she had cold steel will. She didn't have patience, but what the hell!