A couple of hours later—I watched, but Arlene went to sleep on one of the beds—the torso was flopping around, trying to move its nonexistent arms, legs, and head.
“Great,” I said, “but now what? It has no mouth; how can it tell us anything?”
“Vocoder,” said Sears and Roebuck, speaking for the first time since finding the body. They clipped a few more leads onto the chest of the Fred, palmed a touchplate, and a mechanical voice sounded through the speakers.
. . . DARES STAND AGAINST THE MIGHTY . . . WHO DARES THE DEMONS OF UNBEHEADED SUNLIGHT WHO FOOLISHLY TEMPTS THE . . . PEOPLE OF THE DARK AND THE HOT THE PEOPLE OF THE CRACKS OF—”
Sears and Roebuck turned it off. They fiddled with the settings and played it again, this time all in a weird language that made my teeth ache—presumably Sears and Roebuck’s own language.
Arlene had jerked awake at the first noise. She stared wildly, still trying to cold-boot her brain and figure out who was just shouting.
“Pretty impressive,” I said. “How did it know English?”
Sears and Roebuck stared at me as if I were a particularly slow child. “Fly, you and Arlene have been talk around English for eight week now. What you did think the compu-nets were doing?”
I got a creepy feeling in my gut, like a couple of poisonous centipedes had got loose in there. “You mean that thing has been listening to every word we say? Jesus.”
Arlene looked around nervously. “Has it been . . . watching us, too?”
“Sometimes.”
“Even when . . . during my private moments, in the bathhouse?”
“Sometimes,” admitted Sears and Roebuck, adding nonchalantly, “we spent time observing you two, too. We are curious how you mates if you will demonstrate use of your mate apparatus.”
Arlene turned red as a radish; I’m not kidding! For years in the Light Drop, she had showered around men, used the toilet (or the ground) in front of men, and even had sex with Dodd in front of the guys when she got drunk once . . . and here she was flushing fire-engine red at the thought of an alien and a computer having seen her naked! I couldn’t help laughing, and she glared M-14 rounds at me.
“Need to find tuning,” muttered Sears and Roebuck, fooling with the buttons. I stared, reminded of about a thousand and one cheesy sci-fi movies that Arlene regularly made me watch while she gave running commentary about which star’s sister was the mistress of the head of Wildebeest Studios. (“Jeez, it’s Dr. Mabuse,” whispered Arlene in my ear.)
“Try question them now,” suggested Sears and Roebuck, pretending for their own peace of mind that there were really two Fred aliens instead of one. As a double-entity, Sears and Roebuck never had been able to deal with beings other than in pairs, pairs of pairs, and so forth: they had no trouble dealing with Fly and Arlene, but when it was Fly and Arlene and Captain Hidalgo, Sears and Roebuck threw a fit!
I cleared my throat. “State your name for the record,” I began, just trying to provoke some response from the Fred.
“I will be Ramakapithduraagnazdifleramakanor—”
“You will henceforth be designated Rumplestiltskin,” I decided. Damned if I were going to try to repeat that horrible squabble of sound! “Rumplestiltskin, I am Taggart. You may also be questioned by Sanders and by Sears and Roebuck. You will answer all questions, or we’ll leave you immobile on the planet surface forever.”
“Rumplestiltskin responds. What if he answers questions from the Taggart?”
“You’ll be disintegrated and your spirit will be sent wherever it goes upon disintegration.”
“Rumple bumple mumple humple . . .”
“Do you accept the terms?”
“Rumplestiltskin answers questions. Bumple.”
I sighed. I had to keep reminding myself we were peering directly into the brain of a Fred—a Fred that had lain dead for God knows how long, slowly going mad.
In fact, that was a good first question. “Rumplestiltskin: how long have you lain beneath the rubble?”
“Rubble bubble wubble tubble—”
“Rumplestiltskin will answer the question!”
“I—I—I—I—I—Rumplestiltskin answers questions. Rumplestiltskin lay for 19,392 suns.”
Arlene tapped at her watch calculator again. “This planet rotates four hundred and twelve times per orbit, so that’s forty-seven Fredyears plus twenty-eight Freddays.”
“What’s that in dog years?” I asked.
“For us, that’s about forty years, six months.”
“Jesus. Rumplestiltskin, were your people attacked nineteen thousand suns ago?”
“Whack smack back crack whack smack back crack”
“Who attacked you?”
“Newbies soobies.”
“Was it a new species? Rumplestiltskin, how did you meet your attackers?”
“Rumplestiltskin’s people met the news on their own world we expand our great empire we conquer all we shall pound the Others into hotrock.”
I closed my eyes, sorting through the Fred’s tangled speech. Arlene whispered into her throat mike, so I alone heard her speculation: “Fly, think they found a new species on its own planet, and somehow it ended up attacking and destroying the Fred home planet?”
I grunted affirm; that was what I had figured from the yammering. But there were some real problems here; Sears and Roebuck had made it pretty clear that most species took millions of years to get from civilization to spaceflight—humans were such an exception that we caught the Fred by surprise. They first discovered us about four or five hundred years ago, while Spain and Portugal were still sailing out in wooden wind-driven ships to map the “New World.” The Fred confidently assumed we were tens of thousands of years away from being able to offer any effective resistance.
They didn’t like us; they feared us because we, of all the intelligent races known in the galaxy, could die. They decided to exterminate us—another move in the megenia-long chess match for control of the galaxy. In the battle between the “Hyperrealists” and the “Deconstructionists,” we played the role of Kefiristan, the poor unsophisticated farmer in whose backyard a minor skirmish is fought.
Hyperrealists, Deconstructionists—the terms were courtesy Sears and Roebuck, who searched long and hard through Earth philosophy and decided that wacko, effeminate, limp-wristed literary critics in New York were the finest, most refined philosophers of the bunch. What a kick in the nuts: this great, grand political war between two mighty empires turned on a doctrinal difference of aesthetics between two competing schools of literary criticism. Billions of lives hung in the balance between one dumbass way of dissecting “eleven fragment stories” and another, both of which missed the point entirely, of course. That much, Sears and Roebuck told us, but no more. I had no idea what the hell that meant; eleven story fragments? But try telling S and R that.
His species, the Klave, were members of the Hyperrealist tong; the evil Freds represented the slimy, dishonorable Deconstructionist tong. Someday, somehow, I was going to beat those sons of bitches, Sears and Roebuck, into explaining the whole damned thing to me. In the meanwhile, I just shrug and thank God we soldiers don’t have to understand politics in order to follow orders.
Anyway, the Freds miscalculated . . . catastrophically. When they returned to Fredworld, raised an invasion force (taking about a century to do so), then returned, a mere half a millennium had passed—but to the Freds’ shock, they found not a planetful of ignorant, superstitious farmers and sailors, but a technologically advanced, planet-wide culture with missiles, nuclear weapons, particle beams, spaceflight, and a brain trust unfrightened by horn and fang, scale and claw.
Even after Arlene and I kicked their asses, when we left Earth, humanity was on the ropes . . . just like the old heavyweight Muhammad Ali. We played rope-a-dope with the “demons,” and if Salt Lake City and Chicago were nuclear wastelands, so were the Fred bases on Phobos and Deimos. Worse, the last remnants of Fox Company—not only me and Arlene but Albert and our teenage hacker Jill�
��had managed to rescue the former human, now cyborg, Ken Estes, which gave us the potential to tap into the Fred’s entire technology base. The Freds were genetically engineering human infiltrators, but we were training einsatzgruppen.
God only knew what was going to happen, since we left Earth right at the exciting part. Or what had happened already, actually. I had to bear in mind that by the time we could return to the mother planet, four hundred years would have passed!
The Freds made a critical miscalculation when they assumed humans evolved at the same rate as everybody else in the galaxy. Was it possible they made the same mistake again, this time to far more disastrous consequence?
Time to get a bit more specific with Rumplestiltskin: “When you found the Newbies, what was their technological level?”
“Techno tackno crackno farmer harmer—”
“Were they industrial or agricultural?”
“Culture vulture nulture—”
“Rumplestiltskin will answer. Were the Newbies technological?”
“Evils! We came to herd as they herded we came to harvest as they harvested we came to wander as they wandered we came to herd as they herded!”
Herding . . . harvesting—nomads? Farmers, just discovering animal husbandry? I prodded the undead Fred for another half hour, eliciting little other information. The best I could tell was that the “Newbies” had evidently just discovered agriculture and ranching; they were just settling down from their nomadic life when the Fred scoutship observed and studied them. They made contact with the Newbies and fought a few skirmishes, just probing them.
The Freds returned to Fredworld; this was probably three hundred or more years back, just around the time the first Fred expedition returned from contact with Earth. The Freds horsed around for a while, not long, then they returned to the Newbie system, just a couple of hundred years after they left . . . only to find that the Newbies had gone from the beginnings of agriculture to a heavily armed, spacefaring culture in just two centuries!
And that’s where Rumplestiltskin started to get hazy. The rest of the interrogation was long, tedious, boring, tedious, dull, and tedious; even Sears and Roebuck lost interest and started monkeying with the navigational system . . . which was unlocked, now that we’d reached the preprogrammed destination. I figured Sears and Roebuck had never interrogated a prisoner before; it’s not a process for the impatient.
I got a story, but I had no idea whether I got the story. This is what I finally dragged out of old Rump, with me and Arlene making a lot of intuitive leaps and filling in the background as best we could: when the Freds arrived at the Newbie planet, ready to take the “empty” square in the giant chess game between the Hyperrealists and the Deconstructionists, they discovered a weird, unknown piece on the board. The Newbies must have an accelerated evolution that is as fast compared to us humans as we are compared to the rest of the galaxy! The Newbies were so stellar that they tore through the Fred fleet like a cat through a fleet of canaries.
And then—this was the part neither I nor Arlene really bought, though it was such a lovely thought it was hard to resist—the Newbies backtracked the Freds and invaded Fredworld itself, utterly annihilating it in revenge for trying to conquer the Newbies!
What a beautiful picture—the Freds, in a panic, desperately defending their homeworld against an unknown foe who had been herding sheep and building twig-and-wattle huts just two (subjective) centuries before! Arlene and I laughed long and loud at that one. Sears and Roebuck must have thought we were loons, since the Klave have nothing remotely like a “sense of humor” defense mechanism; they just look at each other.
The last part of the story I got was the creepiest: Rumplestiltskin insisted, over and over, that those damned nasty Newbies were still here. But where?
4
Sears and Roebuck began yanking their heads back and forth again, expressing some sort of emotion only a Klave could understand. “What are you on about?” I demanded, still stewing about the missing Newbies.
“We have faxed the injuns,” declared our compatriot. “To where would like you to go?”
Another hour had passed, and neither Arlene nor I had gotten another intelligible word out of Rumplestiltskin. “What do you think?” I asked Arlene. “Has he fulfilled his part of the bargain?”
She pursed her lips. “I can’t think of anything else to ask. We’ve hit a brick wall in every direction now.” Arlene inhaled deeply, then swallowed a nutrient pill. “Yeah, Fly, I guess he’s done what he agreed. You going to burn him?”
I shrugged. “I promised—deal’s a deal.”
Gingerly, I reached across and pulled all the connections from the torso of the Fred. I looked across at Sears and Roebuck, but they had completely lost interest, their long arms reaching all around the Fred navigational unit, the one in this district of the ship, and disconnecting and reconnecting fiber-optic cables. “You, ah, know where there’s a Fred ray?”
The Fred ray was the last-ditch weapon that they used against us when we rampaged through their base, and later their ship; it was some sort of particle beam weapon, much better than ours. Arlene had inventoried the weapons on the Fred ship, including seventy-four Fred rays; she took me to the nearest one, leaving me to drag the torso behind.
Turning my head away, praying to avoid vomiting and completely humiliating myself in front of my friend and subordinate, I balanced the torso on a neutron-repellant backdrop, the only thing that would stop the beam. The body fell over, and I set it up again. Then I stepped back and cranked the weapon around to point at the Fred’s chest, where it stored its brain.
“Man, I don’t like doing this,” I muttered.
“Fly, he’s been trapped dead underneath that rubble outside for forty years. One eye was open—remember?”
“So?”
“So for four decades, Sergeant, Rumplestiltskin stared unblinking at the ground or the sky or the sun, knowing his entire species had been wiped out in the wink of an eye by an alien race they were going to enslave. Fly, he’s suffered enough; don’t trap him inside that corporeal bottle.”
My hands started shaking as I inserted a jerry-rigged pair of chopsticks into the holes to press the levers, simulating a Fred hand.
Arlene put her hand on my shoulder. “You want I should do it?”
I shook my head firmly. “No, A.S., didn’t you read Old Yeller when you were a little girl?”
“No, I was too busy reading Voyage to the Mushroom Planet and The Star Beast.”
“When your dog has to die, Arlene, you’ve got to shoot him yourself. You can’t get someone else to shoot Old Yeller for you.”
I pressed the lever, completing the connection. As usual, we saw nothing. That was the part that bothered me the most: as destructive as this neutron beam was, you’d think you would see something, for God’s sake! A blue light, a lightning bolt, fire and brimstone—something. But the beam was as invisible as X-rays in the dentist’s office, and as quiet; all I heard was a single click, and suddenly there was a huge hole through Rumplestiltskin’s chest. Within three or four seconds, its body was boiling, the flesh vaporizing instantly wherever the beam touched.
I slowly burned away the entire torso. The Fred ray was a gigantic eraser—everywhere I pointed, flesh simply vanished. A minute after turning on the beam, I clicked it off; nothing remained of the Fred but an invisible mist of organic molecules in a hot ionized plasma state. My guess was the interrogation was pretty permanently over.
“Okay, kiddo,” I said to A.S.; “let’s go Newbie hunting.”
We suited up for combat, and for the first time in God knows how long, I found myself getting the shakes. Somehow, I’d thought the Freds would have burned all the fear out of me, leaving nothing but a cold husk of sociopathy. Not true. At the thought of going up against whatever it was that plowed the Freds into the dirt on their own home turf, my hands trembled so much I couldn’t even StiKro my boots on tight.
“Stay here and keep the engine ru
nning,” I told Sears and Roebuck.
“You want to start me the engines?” they asked, confused.
“Just a figure of speech, you dufoids,” Arlene explained. “But run through the launch sequence up to just before engine start. . . . We may have to book if we stumble onto a whole nest of them.”
Sears and Roebuck looked at each other, Alley Oop and his mirror image; they seemed perfectly content staying aboard the ship and letting the Marines do the dirty work. I sealed up the helmet and pressed the other armor seals tight; it wasn’t a pressure suit, but in a pinch, we could survive a few minutes in hard vacuum. I noticed Arlene’s face was whiter than its usual English pale; she must have figured the odds the same as I.
My breath sounded loud in my ears as we edged down the gangway onto the surface of Fredworld again. The landscape looked eerily alive through the night-vis flipdowns, tinted green but combining infrared, radio emission, and visible light enhancement. I turned slowly with a microwave motion detector; nothing moved around us, unless it was over the jagged mountains on the horizon.
“This isn’t good,” I said over a shielded, encrypted channel to Arlene. “Shouldn’t there be some life, even if the Newbies killed all the Freds?”
“Maybe they couldn’t tell which were Freds and which were animals, so they fragged everything. Maybe they used a nuclear bomb, or some kind of poison or a biovector.”
I grunted. “Doesn’t seem likely that they’d manage to get absolutely every living thing, does it?”
“There’s another possibility, Fly: maybe there are living animals, but they’re just not moving.”
“Animal means moving, Arlene, like animated.” She didn’t answer, so I started a spiral sweep, mainly watching the outer perimeter. After three hours of recon, I was starting to regret being so nice and burning Rumplestiltskin’s mortal coil, setting free his soul. “If that bastard lied to me—”
“You’ll what?” came Arlene’s radio voice in my ear. “Resurrect him and kill him again?”
“Maybe we should resurrect the Freds on the ship. Whoops, don’t correct me; I just figured out how stupid that suggestion was.” I managed to catch her while she was inhaling, or else she would have quickly snorted that the Freds on the ship knew even less about the Newbies than we—we had already killed them before we left for Fredworld, a hundred and sixty years before the Newbies landed!
Endgame Page 4