The weirdness of the place was starting to get to me. I kept seeing ghosts in my peripheral vision, but there was nothing when I whipped around with the motion detector. “Damn that Rumplestiltskin! He swore they were still here!”
“Maybe he just meant they were here when he died?”
I paused a long time. “Arlene, if that’s all he meant, then we’re in deep, deep trouble. I don’t think you realize how deep.”
“I don’t get you. If we can’t find them, we jump back in the ship and return to—to Earth.” She didn’t say it, but I knew she was thinking to a dead, loveless Earth with no Albert Gallatin.
“A.S., if we don’t find the Newbies, I can almost guarantee they’re going to find us. They’ll find Earth. We were almost wiped out by the Freds. We barely hung on, and only because we evolved so much faster than they, we were so much more flexible—because they underestimated us! What the hell do you think would happen to humanity if the Newbies found us next?”
“Jesus. I didn’t think—”
“And if they can go from stone plows and oxen to—to this in just two hundred years, where are they going to be just ten years from now? What if they don’t find us for fifty years, or a hundred years? Jesus and Mary, Arlene; they would be gods.”
She was silent; I heard only my own breath. I almost considered asking her to switch to hot-mike, so I could hear her breathing as well, but I couldn’t afford to lose control now, not when I had troops depending on me. Above all else, I had to demonstrate competence and confidence.
“Fly,” she said at last, “I don’t like this. I’m getting scared.” She wrapped her arms around her chest and shivered, as if feeling a chill wind or someone walking across her grave.
“Maybe we can pick up some trace from orbit.”
“After forty years?”
“Maybe Sears and Roebuck has some idea.” Yeah, right. Sears and Roebuck never even heard of the Newbies until just now, and if they had that hard a time understanding us and our evolutionary rate—Jeez, how could they even imagine the Newbies and what they might mutate into? “Let’s head back,” I decided. “We’re not doing anything out here but scaring the pants off of each other.”
Arlene nodded gravely. “Kinky,” she judged.
I heard a strange, faint buzz in my earpiece as we headed back toward the ship . . . sounds, voices almost. I could nearly believe they were whispers from the Fred ghosts, desperately trying to communicate—perhaps still fighting the final battle that had destroyed them. I was now convinced that there was not a single artichoke-headed Fred left intact on that planet, except for the corpses we brought with us—corpses we would never revive. In fact, I decided to leave them behind on Fredworld; the temptation to wake the dead, just for someone to talk to, might be too great, overwhelming our common sense and self-preservation.
But the notion of ghosts wasn’t that far-fetched. Since their spirits never died, where did they go? I began to feel little stabs of cold on the back of my neck, icy fingers poking and prodding me. Jesus, shut off that imagination! I commanded myself.
“Huh?” Arlene asked, jumping guiltily. “Criminey, Fly, are you a mind reader now?”
I said nothing . . . hadn’t even been aware I spoke that last thought aloud; curious coincidence that it turned out to be perfectly appropriate.
The ship was so huge that it was hard to recognize it as mobile; it looked like an artificial mountain, three-eighths of a kilometer high, over a hundred stories—taller than the Hyundai Building in Nuevo Angeles—and stretching to the vanishing point in either direction. The landing pad was barely larger than the footprint of the ship, clearly built to order. Weird markings surrounded the LZ, the landing zone, burned into the glass-hard surface by an etching laser, either landing instructions or ritual hieroglyphs. They looked like they once had been pictograms, now stylized beyond recognition.
“You know, Fly, we’ve never actually walked all the way around this puppy.”
“I know. I’ve been avoiding it. I don’t like thinking of how big this damned ship really is.”
Arlene sounded pensive, even through the radio. “Honey, Sergeant, I’ve had this burning feeling—”
“Try penicillin.”
“I’ve had this burning feeling that we have to walk this path, walk all the way around what’s going to be our world for the next nine weeks, or however long it takes until we finally get . . . home.”
I stared back and forth between the obsidian LZ and the ship door, torn. “You’re right.” I sighed. “We ought to reconnoiter. Arlene, take point.”
“Aye-aye, Skipper,” she said, voice containing an odd mixture of elation and anxiety. She unslung her RK-150, and I flexed my grip on the old, reliable standard, the Marine-issue M-14, which contrary to the designator was more like an updated Browning automatic rifle than the Micronics series of M-7, -8, -10, and -12. These were heavy-lifting small arms, and the Freds were pretty pathetic when not surrounded by their “demonic” war machines. I don’t know what we expected to run into on Fredworld; nothing good, I suspected.
I thought about calling Sears and Roebuck and telling them what we were doing, but we were right outside. If they wanted us, they could call their own damned selves. Still feeling that chill on the nape of my neck, I followed Arlene at a safe twenty-five meters.
It was hard not to be awestruck next to that ship. It was hard to credit; the Freds could do this, and they couldn’t even conquer a low-tech race like humanity! They always taught us at Parris Island that heart and morale mattered more than tanks and air support in combat: look at the Mujahadeen in Afghanistan and Bosnia, at the Scythe of Glory in Kefiristan. But this was the first time I really believed that line: we really wanted the fight, and the Freds were unprepared for resistance.
The ship was gunmetal gray along most of its flank, except where micrometeorites had scored the surface or punctured it. Thank God for self-sealing architecture; at the speeds we traversed the galaxy, cosmic dust sprayed through the ship like bullets through cheese.
We reached the aft end and stared up at the single, staggeringly huge thruster. The ship was a ramjet, according to the specs: as it moved at increasing velocity relative to the interstellar hydrogen, an electromagnetic net spread out in front of the boat, scooping up protons and alpha particles and funneling them into the “jets,” where the heat from direct conversion of matter to energy turned the hydrogen into a stream of plasma out the ass-end. No other way could we accelerate so near the speed of light in only three or four days.
The thruster at the back looked exactly like a standpipe. I kid you not; I caught myself looking for the faucet that would turn on the water. We rounded the stern and headed for’ard again.
About a kilometer from the stern, we found it—we found our first, and only, Newbie body. Arlene saw something and jogged forward; I dropped to one knee and covered her, watching her through my snap-up rifle scope. She ran under the ship, finally having to crouch and skitter sideways for the last couple score meters; this close to the ship, the underside looked like a building overhang where it rose away from the cup-shaped LZ.
“Jesus,” she muttered. “Sergeant Fly, get your butt up here and eyeball this thing.”
“What is it?” I asked, trotting toward her position at port-arms.
“I’d rather you saw it for yourself without preconceptions.” She sounded tense and excited, and I double-timed the pace.
By the time I approached, I was panting. Jeez, what adding another stripe does to a Marine’s physical fitness! Arlene didn’t look tense; her RK-150 hung off her back totally casual. She was staring at something underneath the ship, where you’d have to crawl on your hands and knees to see it. She shone a pencil-light on the thing; it looked like a body of some sort, or was once . . . but definitely not a Fred.
“Hold my rifle,” I said, handing it to her. “I’m going under and take a look.”
She eyed the overhanging ship uneasily. “You sure this thing isn’t
going to roll over on you?”
“If’n it do, li’l lady,” I said, doing my Gunny Goforth imitation, “we-all gwan be inna heap’a troubles.” The ship overhung us even where we stood, stretching a good fifty meters beyond us; if it chose to roll over, we’d be squashed like a bug on a bullet anyway, no matter where we stood.
But I sure didn’t like crawling under the thing; I could feel the mass of immensity over my back; I got about ten meters in when I experienced a rush of utter, total panic. I’d never felt claustrophobic before! Why then? The ship felt like an upside-down mountain balanced on its peak, ready to topple over and crush me. I froze, unable to move, while waves of panic battered me. The only thing that kept me from turning around and crab-crawling back out of there was the fact that Arlene was staring at me, and I would rather die than have her think a sergeant in the Marine Corps was a screaming coward.
After a minute, the panic subsided into gripping anxiety; it was still horrible, but now bearable. “Are you all right?” Arlene called from behind me.
“Y-yeah, just trying to f-figure out what the thing is. Gotta git a lit . . . get a little closer.” I forced myself to crawl until I was as close as I could get. I set up my Sure Fire flashlight-lantern to illuminate the body while I inched forward until my head was caught between the spongy material and the ship’s hull.
It was amazing, a scene straight out of The Wizard of Oz: when the Fred ship touched down, it landed right on top of a dead alien! It definitely wasn’t a Fred; this creature looked more like an alien is supposed to look: white skin, long multiple articulated arms and legs, fingers like tendrils, not like the Freds’ chopsticks or Sears and Roebuck’s cilia. I swear to God, this thing actually had antennae, even. The eyes were huge, big as the cross-section on an F-99 Landing Flare, and Coca-Cola red; I couldn’t quite see, but I think they continued around the back of the head. The face was turned toward me, and I got hot and cold chills running up and down my spine, like it was staring at me and demanding why? The mouth was a red slit, and there was no nose—dark lines on the sides of the face, where the cheeks would be on a human, might have been air filters.
My heart started pounding again, another wave of panic; I was staring at my first Newbie—I just knew.
After I calmed down a bit, I slithered sideways, through my light; it was a bad moment when I eclipsed the light, casting the Newbie into total shadow. God only knew what it was doing in the dark. I got far enough to the side to see the body and legs. “You know,” I yelled back, my voice still shaky, “this thing doesn’t look half bad. It’s crushed a little, but I think it could be salvageable.”
Arlene yelled something back that I couldn’t hear, then she got smart and spoke into her throat mike instead. “Can you drag it out if I throw you a rope?”
“I bet I can,” I responded. I was never a rodeo roper, but I’d been around a calf or two in my day. I grew up on a farm and worked the McDonald’s Ranch when I was a kid. “Throw me the rope, A.S. I bet I can lasso that thing and drag it into the light of day. Kiddo, I think we may have gotten our first lucky break on this operation.”
5
We carried our gruesome trophy back into the ship, plopping it down on the table right behind Sears and Roebuck. When they turned, they stared, eyes almost popping out of their skulls. “What that is?”
“I was hoping you could tell us,” I grumbled. I had gotten used to Sears and Roebuck’s galaxy-weary, we’ve-seen-everything-twice pose; I was even more shocked than the Magillas themselves at their confusion. “Are you saying this is an entirely new race of beings you’ve never seen before?”
“No,” they said, “and whatever disgusting is it is. The color is all wrong and the eyes are something horrible. Where did you get it?”
“Ship fell on it,” explained Arlene. “Could this be a Newbie, the race Rumplestiltskin was on about, the guys that wiped out the Freds?”
“Well something outwiped the Fred, that is sure,” said Sears and Roebuck. “If there no other life forms of life here, then is logically that is the Newbie.”
“Great, fine, cool,” I interrupted, “but can you revive the bloody thing?” I jabbed a meaty finger at them. “And don’t hack off any arms or legs this time! You turned my stomach with what you did to Rumplestiltskin.”
Sears and Roebuck didn’t answer. Instead, they grabbed an ultrasound and an X-ray and began mapping the gross anatomy of the Newbie. After half an hour of building up a reasonable 3-D model in the data stack, they dragged the heavy corpse into a ring that looked like it was made of bamboo—probably some sort of CAT scan or Kronke mapper that the Fred doctors used.
Arlene and I kicked back and talked about old sci-fi movies we had watched. She thought the creature looked like the aliens in Communion, but I held out for a giant-size version of the things from E.T. Finally, an hour and ten minutes into the examination, Sears and Roebuck suddenly answered, “Yes.”
It took me a moment to figure out they were answering my original question. “Say again? You’re saying you can revive it?”
“We can revive them if the other half you find.”
“Other half? S and R, this thing was alone under there . . . that’s all there is; it’s not a double-entity like you.”
They stared at me for a few moments, but I’m not sure they really got it. Sears and Roebuck were Klave, and the Klave were always paired . . . always paired. Normally, they couldn’t even deal with individuals—they literally couldn’t see them! If you were alone, they would usually see a phantom second person; if you showed up as part of a triad—A, B, and C—the Klave would see three pairs: A and B, B and C, A and C . . . something we found out before Hidalgo bought it on the beam-in.
But Sears and Roebuck was—were?—an ambassador of sorts, and lately they’d gotten much practice coping with singles. Even so, sometimes they forgot.
They looked offended and pained. They lugged the corpse to the operating table and began the process of first figuring out what had “killed” the Newbie, then fixing it; that was all it took to revive anything in the galaxy . . . except a human being.
Sears and Roebuck spent a long time hunting for organic damage, finding nothing; at last, they announced the mystery solved: the Newbie had died of malnutrition! Evidently, it had been left behind accidentally and eventually ran out of dietary supplement pills. As its last action, it went and lay down right on the LZ, hoping to be found and revived, and that was what nearly got the thing scrunched flatter than an armadillo on a tank tread. Another few meters to one side, and splat!
Alas, that was a tough problem to cure. None of us had any idea how malnutrition affected Newbies. Sears and Roebuck did a biochemical analysis and thought they had isolated the essential nutrients. They compared them to what you could find on Fredworld, figuring out what was missing, then they had to guess what systems that would destroy.
The upshot was that Arlene and I were ordered to take a hike for a day or two; we spent it exploring the ship, mapping all the “object-oriented” divisions of the ultraindividualist Freds. Strange, I never in my wildest nightmares thought I would be fighting alongside the ultimate collectivist Klave to defeat the ultraindividualist Freds! But a Marine is not there to make policy, just to enforce it.
We checked back frequently. I wouldn’t put it past Sears and Roebuck to revive the Newbie without bothering to wait for me and Arlene. But at last they said they were ready. They had been washing various organlike objects in a nutrient bath, running a low-level electrical current through them for two days. Now they jump-started the hearts with big jolts of electricity, and the damned thing moaned, flapped its arms, and sat up—alive again, oo-rah.
The Newbie slowly stared at each of us, especially curious about Sears and Roebuck; it made no attempt to escape, attack, or even step off the operating table. I guess it figured we were unknown quantities—best not to rile us just yet.
The thing started picking up our language from the moment we revived it. I asked Arlen
e whether she had me covered, and the Newbie had all the vocabulary I used (Arlene, name; you, me, pronouns; covered, guarded with a gun) and half our language structure (interrogative, expression) down cold in six seconds. I started asking it simple questions; after the second or third one, it was answering in good English, a lot better than Sears and Roebuck had ever managed to learn. An hour after reviving, we were having an animated conversation!
“What is your name?” I asked.
“Newbies.”
Thanks a lump. “Not you as a species, you as an individual. . . . What is your name?”
“Newbies.”
I shook my head. There was some sort of confusion, but maybe it was just the language. “All right, Newbie, what did you do to the Freds, to the ones who were here before you?”
“They were broken, but we couldn’t fix them.”
“How were they broken?”
The Newbie stared unanswering for a moment; I figured he was calculating the time factor. “Eleven decades elapsed between contacts by the Freds, and they had not grown to meet the circumstances. We expected to surrender and seek fixing, but they were broken and had to be fixed.”
“We found a Fred here who said you destroyed them, wiped them all off the face of the planet. Why did you kill him and his buddies?”
“What is a Fred?”
“A Fred! The Freds!” I waved my arms in exasperation. “Why did you kill them?”
“We are not familiar with a Fred. The Freds were broken; they did not grow to meet the circumstances. We attempted to fix them, but it was beyond our capabilities. We eliminated them from the mix while we studied the problem. The next time we encounter such a breakage, we shall have grown.”
Endgame Page 5