“[New word]-circle around impact [new word] and [new word] from another-different quarter?”
“Power emissions? Moving infrareds? Radio or radioisotope?”
“[New word], sub-sir. [New word] dead cold.”
“Don’t [new word] circle. Approach [new word] but cautiously.”
I could follow the conversation despite missing every third or fourth word; they debated whether we had been destroyed or not. Their voices were distant and cold, as if they were discussing an advertising campaign instead of a military campaign. They sounded totally dispassionate, like perfect soldiers. I tried to hate them because of what they had done to us, shooting us down and nearly killing us all. But I just couldn’t. Right or wrong, they were ours, and Marines always believe in pulling a buddy out of the crossfire. Besides, they had obviously thought we were Freds.
Arlene gripped my upper arm so intensely she left indentations that would probably remain for hours. Evidently she figured it out the same time I did. We didn’t talk. Knowing they were English-speaking humans made us too nervous even to rely on the short effective range of our mikes. I spoke to her in hand signals: Circle around, isolate one, capture alive. I wanted to get that sergeant. I pointed to the stripes on my left shoulder, and Arlene nodded. But before she could move out, the prey moved away—on foot this time.
We paralleled them, following them back the way we had come. Arlene and I skulked, but Sears and Roebuck simply walked normally—I made them follow about two hundred and fifty meters back and hoped they had decent infrared jamming. I was desperately hungry for the sergeant, but when one of the humans fell behind, it was one of the scouts instead.
Well, if beggars were horses, choosers would wish. Around other side, I signed to Corporal Sanders. She shuffled silently through the sand, cutting around behind the straggler. Three, I signaled, two, one, now!
Arlene and I charged forward from the dink’s left and right rear quarters, tackling him before he ever saw us. I pushed my forearm against his throat and leaned hard, cutting off any sound he might try to make, while Arlene ripped away every wire and fiberoptic cable she could find.
The prisoner stared at me, eyes as big as dinner plates. He clawed at my arm, trying to pull it loose so he could suck in a breath of air, but I wasn’t budging. Arlene ran her receiver antenna all across his body, along every limb, and even up his crotch. She found two transceivers, two tiny fragile nodules sewn inside his uniform; she plucked them free and destroyed them by crushing them between thumb and middle finger. I let loose on his throat, just in time; he sucked in huge lungfuls of air, trying to breathe through the ozone. I grabbed him under his arms, Arlene got his feet, and we ran, carrying him between us, for about half a klick.
We pushed him into the dust and lay next to him; Arlene cuffed him with a plastic tie, while I lay across him and watched his pals through the scope. It took them another two hundred meters before they realized he had been picked off; they backtracked, but by then the fickle wind had blown the ultrafine sand around, obliterating our tracks. As they began to fan out for a spiral search, calling him repeatedly over the radio, A.S., Sears and Roebuck, and I withdrew far from the canyon carved by the Fred ship . . . and even that gouge was filling, starting to be hard to spot. At two kilometers directly perpendicular to our trail, I called a halt. I figured we were far enough along that they weren’t likely to find us anytime soon, now that we had destroyed all of the prisoner’s electronic tells . . . we hoped.
I knelt down next to the guy. He looked vaguely Mongolian and vaguely Mediterranean, a perfectly normal human with black hair and dark brown eyes, dark-complected, with slight Oriental folds over his eyes. But from when? How far advanced was he over us? We had left Earth some three or four hundred years ago; I wasn’t really sure of the conversion factor. But when did he leave?
I drew my boot knife and rested it alongside his neck. “Chill, brother,” I said, then thought better of it. Language had evidently changed in several centuries—best to avoid expressions as much as possible, stick to basic English. “We are humans,” I said, indicating Arlene and myself. “We need information. Why are you here?”
The moment he felt my knife, the prisoner relaxed. He seemed resigned to his fate, whether it was death or release. He listened intently, then nodded a few seconds after I finished. “Yes,” he said, with a strange pronunciation of the vowel—it came out like Yauz.
“No, you do not understand,” I persisted. “Why are you here?”
“Yes . . . we—came from—Earthground planet.”
“I can tell.”
“Cut the crap!” Arlene snarled. I drew my finger across my throat, and she shut up.
“What was the reason for you to come?” I tried again.
My prisoner seemed only too eager to talk—something which always sets off alarm bells in my head. I mean, why should he want to help us? “Yes. We have arrived [unintelligible] to chase.”
“What are you chasing?”
“[New word]. Aliens. When come you from?”
I told him the year we left, and his brows shot up instantly. He didn’t take time to calculate what that was in dog years, so I presumed when he left people still used the same calendar we did. “Taggart, Sanders,” I said, introducing us. “They are Sears and Roebuck, but don’t ask me which is which.” Or even if that concept had meaning to the binary Klave.
“Josepaze Papoulhandes [new word] Fine [new word].”
“Josepaze?” He looked down for a moment; it was ritualized, and I figured it probably meant what nodding your head meant in our time. “Josepaze, what aliens did you chase here?”
He struggled, obviously trying to avoid any new expressions that would confuse me. I was still suspicious of his level of cooperation, but he seemed to have given up any concern about his duty, his unit, even his own life; it was like everything had lost all meaning, now that I had a blade against his carotid artery. I was used to people relaxing if they thought they were about to die, but this was entirely too apathetic.
“Aliens . . . evolve fast,” he said at last. “Conquered Earth—killed—left—followed here.”
Arlene and I looked up at each other, and I swallowed hard. Newbies? How the hell had they gotten all the way to Earth and back? An evil chill settled across my back and camped there for the night.
9
The evil ice that gripped me around my lower back was a premonition of horrors to come. While I straddled that doofus, holding my commando knife to his throat and wondering why in hell he didn’t make even a pretense of resisting the interrogation, I suddenly noticed an unaccustomed quiet. I looked up. “Lance—what aren’t I hearing?”
She stared around, puzzled. “Where the freak are those freaks, Sears and Roebuck?”
The Klave, binary to the root, never managed to keep perfectly silent; all the stray little thoughts that run through a human’s head run back and forth between the two parts of a Klave pair, either spoken directly out loud or at least subvocalized. They never stopped! It got on my nerves for the first few weeks I knew them, then I pretty much forgot all about it, never even noticing when they muttered back and forth to each other. Just as I couldn’t tell Sears from Roebuck, if that concept even made sense—did they have separate names? I didn’t think they did, Sears and Roebuck being the single name of the single pair—I couldn’t tell one voice from the other. Eventually I dismissed all the muttering like I would a Marine who just couldn’t stop mumbling to himself. I hushed them when necessary for an ambush; otherwise, I ignored it as their unique craziness. Maybe it was ordinary among Klave; maybe they were considered loony even among others of their kind. . . . Hell, I knew they were! They volunteered to accompany us, far away from anyone to resurrect them if they died.
I didn’t notice the constant rumbling until it suddenly vanished, replaced by the eerie silence of the uninhabited planet we all hunted across for trace of the Newbies. The sifting sand was so fine, it made no whisper as one grain brushed a
nother, and there were no trees to sigh in the persistent wind. Every sound from Arlene and me was magnified a thousand times by the surrounding silence. . . . I should have heard Sears and Roebuck if they were half a klick away!
“Where the hell did they . . . ?” Arlene and I stared around wildly. I felt the prick of eyeballs on the back of my neck whichever way I turned. Long ago, I learned to trust my Fly-stinct: I pointed to my own eyes, then hooked a thumb over my shoulder. Arlene nodded, picked up her lever-action, and braced it against the crook of her arm.
The bastard must’ve had a homing device we couldn’t pick up with our own receivers. I knew it couldn’t be that easy! But where the hell were they? I planted my boot on the prisoner’s chest and stared past Arlene. We each took half the clock. I glanced down at the human; he wasn’t going anywhere, so I lifted my foot and slid sideways to get a better scan. My foot slipped in the sand, and my heart stopped—but I recovered my balance with the loss only of my dignity.
Arlene kept the .45 against her chest, ready to rock ’n’ roll, but not up to her eye; she didn’t want to start focusing on sand dunes or heat reflections and miss something move. I knew my rifle was cocked with a round in the chamber, but I had an almost irresistible urge to run the bolt once more. I fought down the compulsion—last thing I wanted was to look nervous in front of my “man.”
I should have worried instead about looking dead. I heard the crack of the firearm exactly the same moment I felt the kick in the back of my vest—not quite a perfect shot, a little high, but with a rifle, you don’t need to be perfect. The round delivered enough energy to kick me forward onto my face and send my own M-14 flying into the sand, where it promptly buried itself. It didn’t matter. I was too busy fighting blackness and the pain in my shoulder, which even in my state I could tell was blown all to hell, to worry about grabbing for my gun.
Dim and distant, I heard Arlene’s rifle barking again and again as she sprayed the area where the shot had come from. Then she went down hard, but held on to her piece. I guess the shot that hit me must have snuck right past my armor to take out my left shoulder. I rolled over onto my right side to get away from the pain, but it followed me, and blood dribbled across my helmet faceplate. This was bad, really bad. I’d never been shot this bad before—isn’t that perverse? First time, on a planet a hundred light-years or more from Earth, in the desert sand, with only my loving friend Lance Corporal Arlene Sanders to watch me die on foreign shores. Now I was babbling.
Maybe A.S. wouldn’t be seeing anything anyway. She was down pretty bad, too—not enough to stop shooting, but I figured she was aiming by instinct now. Our prisoner was screaming in utter terror, louder even than Arlene’s rifle. Jesus, what a weenie. Show some freaking backbone, take it like a man! Arlene took it like a man. She couldn’t see for crap because she’d taken another shot, this one off the faceplate of her helmet, cracking it like a spiderweb. Must have missed her brain because she held her .45 rifle up and tried to shoot over me.
She couldn’t see. . . . I kept telling myself she couldn’t see, even when one of her shots hit me in the freaking hip. I didn’t even feel it by then—I was screaming myself now, screaming about all the evil crap I was going to do to the sons of bitches who were plinking us from God knows where, to them and their freaking mothers and fathers and sons and daughters and neighbors—and burn all their houses down and sow their fields with salt. Arlene was screaming, “Fly Fly Fly,” letting fly until she burned right through the mag.
The precious red stuff poured out of my uniform now, finding the cracks in the armor. Arlene took one in the belly, and even with the flak jacket, she doubled over gasping and sucking for air. Just before I went black to cross the River Styx with pennies on my eyes, I felt hands grab me by the bad arm and yank me over, and I think I screamed with pain again, but I couldn’t match the utterly terror-stricken shrieks of the prisoner. God what a wiener.
So long, Arlene; so long, Fly Taggart; Semper fi, Mac; it sure was nice to wear the eagle and anchor for so many years. Damn, was I glad to die a sergeant instead of a corporal.
I drifted through black stormclouds, feeling like I was falling endlessly backward, dizzy with vertigo. I kept jerking, trying to jerk awake, like you do when you’re in a horrid nightmare and you know you’re just under the surface between sleep and wake, dark dementia and the cold light of dawn—but I just couldn’t do it. I hovered there grabbing for the surface, but it was just out of my grasp. My brain wouldn’t reboot. I felt the pain, but from the outside. . . . When I was a kid, I used to watch the X-rated pictures over at the Covergirl Drive-In; I could see them from a treetop in the woods between our farmhouse and the town of Bartleston. I couldn’t hear the sound and the picture was shaky in my binoculars, but there it was, sex on the screen, bigger than I ever wanted real life to be. That was me in my blackness, feeling my pain, but from a distance. Not quite reconnected with myself.
I slowly swam back. I gathered I wasn’t dead, unless the penguins were all wrong about everything and hell was repeating the fallen world endlessly. I blinked awake and felt the agony for real at last.
Clenching my teeth against the ripping pain, I pulled against my restraints—but, by God, I was not going to give those bastards a scream. Clenching all my teeth? Jeez, they’d fixed my mouth! Arlene lay mostly in my field of vision; I blinked away the tears and noticed the pallor of her skin. She had lost a lot of blood, probably more than I had, and she was white as the cliffs of Dover overlooking the English Channel. I watched closely; I could ignore the pain if I had something else to draw my attention. Her chest rose and fell regularly, and every so often she moved her feet slightly. Arlene Sanders was alive, but how much?
We both were strapped down to gurneys in a gunmetal-gray room fitted with couches and what might have been a sink, but without any visible faucet. I leaned back, silently sobbing, and stared at the overhead: a darker version of the bulkhead color with thousands of tiny bright holes—some sort of light source, I reckoned.
The door opened, and the clipboard sergeant we’d spotted earlier entered, probably in response to my neural rhythms changing with coming awake. He walked all around me in a counterclockwise circle, looking at dials and readouts and scribbling on his clipboard. He didn’t say a word, even when I talked to him: “Hey, you . . . where am I? Am I aboard your ship? We’re not the aliens you’re looking for, but we’re looking for them, too. Can you hear me? I’m a human from Earth, like you, from about two centuries before your time.”
He left without a second glance at me, the puke. But about ten minutes of agony later, his boss arrived. This guy was tall and thin, about my height but twenty kilos lighter; he had sandy hair and a beard with carefully shaved stripes of bare skin in it. He wore a form-fitting T-shirt that made him look ridiculous—no muscle, a total pencil-neck dweeb—tweedy black with a red spiral coiled around his forearm . . . possibly a rank insignia? He walked like a commissioned officer; they make my neck hairs stand on end, and I never know how to react around one.
He spoke to me slowly, and I got most of the words. “You are human. Carry papers showing you are [unknown word] United States Marine Sergeant America [unknown word] Taggart Flynn.”
“I am.”
“Am Overcaptain Ruol Tokughavita, People’s Democratic Defense Forces. Are trapped out of time like you, pursuing Mutates here to keep them off Earth.”
“How long, sir?” I asked.
“Hundred and seven years.” He seemed emotionally detached, but he watched me narrowly.
He hadn’t been away as long as Arlene and I had, but a century wasn’t a fortnight; like us, Overcaptain Tokughavita would return to a different world than he had left—he left his world behind where it never would be found. I felt an immediate sympathy for the overcaptain . . . but I wasn’t sure I trusted those alien eyes.
“Sir, is there a United States of America still? Are we the last Marines?”
“No, Sergeant, but People’s State of Earth.”
“Is there a Constitution?”
“The people need no pact against themselves. Live each for the commons, live each for another.”
Crap. Crap, crap, crap! So in the end we finally lost the battle for individual sovereignty. I lay back, grimacing, but it wasn’t the shoulder pain—I could stand that. Now, not only didn’t I know where and when we were, I didn’t even know what we were; I wasn’t sure we were U.S. Marine Corps anymore. And I didn’t think I’d make much of a fashion splash with a blue helmet and a patch that read People’s Army of Socialist Liberation, or whatever the hell they wore. You Can’t Go Home Again, as old Thomas Wolfe said.
Fine, I thought. Screw you and your whole People’s State of Everything! No matter who was in charge or what they called themselves, by God, there was one U.S. Marine left alive still—two Marines. I knew damned well that Lance Corporal Arlene Sanders stood with me on this one. If the only humans left were weirdo socialists, then we would sign up to help the socialists. Jesus, what else could we do?
Arlene. “Is the other all right?” I said, my voice growing hoarse with the effort.
Overcaptain Tokughavita looked over at her, reading invisible readings; maybe they were projected somewhere, and you needed a contact-lens filter to see them—I don’t know. But he was definitely reading from something right over her bed, and I couldn’t see anything. “Is alive and progressing. Sad had to shoot but didn’t know who you were what you wanted. Came in enemy ship, in league with enemy.”
I grunted noncommittally. It was a screw-up all the way around: they shot at a Fred ship, then we grabbed one of them in response, then they opened fire on the people who had kidnapped one of their troopers. Man!
Something irrational inside me insisted that I would forgive them for shooting me—hell, I already forgave Arlene for shooting me—but I would never forgive them for shooting my buddy. But there was nothing I could do about my anger, not now, not ever . . . not if I wanted to make the best of the bad situation and return to the overcaptain’s Earth. I let the overcaptain apologize and made him feel like I was willing to let the dead past bury its dead. Even if I decided to do something to him later, it was still best to make nice, if only to lull him into a false sense of security.
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