Endgame

by Dafydd ab Hugh

  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 les
s 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.

  Suddenly heavy again after weeks of acceleration ranging from 0.8 g down to zero, I dragged every footstep, and my legs and back ached. Arlene didn’t have it so bad, since she didn’t mass as much as I; she still had a spring in her step and an increasingly grim smile on her face. I knew the feeling; it had been months since I killed anything. After what the Freds had done to my life and my world, I developed the taste for blood. Now that the Newbies had deprived me of my rightful revenge, I was prepared to transfer all that wrath to the new threat.

  In short, I wanted to pump a few rounds into a nice, smooth Newbie chest. But I was also starting to get very, very nervous about what they had managed to evolve into in the four decades they had been down on the planet we approached—assuming they were still there. I saw a number of possible outcomes, none of them pleasant: the frustration of finding no one, the humiliation of capture, the agony of us being annihilated.

  Then without warning one day, the reactor braking suddenly stopped, sending Arlene and me flying (literally, the for’ard bulkhead that had been a deck became a wall instantaneously, dropping us to the outer bulkhead, which now was our only “floor”!). “We’re coming in down to landing,” Sears and Roebuck soberly informed us, then used the last of the hydrogen peroxide retros over the space of an hour to cut the ship’s rotation, leaving us in an orbit that would take us directly into the planet’s atmosphere . . . at about mach seventy (that’s Earth sea-level, dry-air mach speed of seventy, about twenty-three kilometers per second).

  Trying to land at such a speed would kill us as surely as blowing up the reactor pile. But we were rapidly running out of options: when Sears and Roebuck killed the main thrusters, they did so with only a tiny bit of LOX remaining. “How much we got left?” Arlene asked.

  “Approximately it is left 650 seconds is,” they answered, “but only at three gravities of Fredworld for using the maneuvers rockets.”

  Arlene and I looked at each other; that was less than eleven minutes of burn, and without even using the huge main thrusters! Arlene tapped rapidly on her wrist calculator, frowned, and tried the calculation again. “S and R,” she said, broadcasting through her throat mike into the ship’s radio communication system. “I get a net drop of about mach fifty.”

  “That is correct in essential.”

  Arlene lowered her orange brows and spoke slowly, like a child answering what she thinks might be a trick classroom question. “Sears and Roebuck, if we’re doing mach seventy now, and we drop by mach fifty, doesn’t that mean we’re still doing mach twenty?”

  “Yes. The math are simplicity.”

  Now we both looked back and forth in confusion. I took over the interrogation, now that I understood the situation: “S and R, you braindead morons, we’ll still be splattered across the deck like a boxload of metallic atoms!”

  Long pause. Maybe they were manipulating each other’s head in that faintly obscene form of laughter the Klave use. “No my childrens, but for we shall use air-braking to reduceify the rest of the speed.”

  A terrible pit opened in my stomach. Even I knew that the Fred ship was not, repeat not, designed to be abused in such a fashion. It was designed to dock with a pinwheel launcher and even to land gently using the main thrusters to slow all the way to next to nothing . . . not to belly-flop into the atmosphere like a disoriented diver, burning off excess speed by turning its huge surface area directly into the onrushing air!

  We would burn to a crisp. That is, if the ship didn’t tear itself into constituent parts first. “Hang on to yourselves and things,” suggested our mondo-weird, binary pilots. “We’re burning away the fuel starting now.”

  7

  The ship jerked, shimmied like a garden hose, jerked again. “Where the hell’s that crazy mofo?” I demanded.

&nbs
p; Arlene was knocked away from her perch by another sudden “earthquake.” I caught her by the arm, so she didn’t carom across the zero-g ship. “Christ! I think he said he was headed toward Nav Room One, right inside the engine compartment!” The ship twirled like a chandelier, or so it felt; we dangled from handholds, feeling sudden acceleration trying to yank us free to fling us into God knows where. Nearly eleven minutes later, the acceleration vanished as abruptly as it began. Sears and Roebuck finished the final burn. We were dead-sticking it the rest of the way in, and that would be the end of the Fred ship—and possibly of us, too.

  Then the atmosphere thickened enough that we started feeling a real push; the bow of the ship became “down,” the stern “up.” I drifted against the for’ard bulkhead, now floor, with about 0.2 g, which quickly escalated to full, then more than full gravity. Two, three times our normal g! The inertial dampers were offline, probably out of juice; we suffered through the full deceleration phase. Four g’s, four and a half.

  The air-braking went on forever. I was crushed to the deck by about eight hundred pounds of weight! Then the gravity began to slide along the deck toward the ventral bulkhead. Sears and Roebuck were pitching the nose upward to expose more of the hull to the atmosphere.

  We shed airspeed even as we gained more weight. I heard a horrific explosion astern of us—the ship swerved violently, hurling us across the new floor! Arlene fell against me, but I was stunned. I shook my head. “What the freaking hell—!”

  She stared out a porthole, face ashen. “Jesus, Fly! Freakin’ ship splitting!” She slid her hand along the deck and pointed. I just barely saw a huge piece of the Fred ship below us, tumbling end over end, shattering into “tiny” splinters scores of meters long.