Endgame

by Dafydd ab Hugh

  Arlene led an infiltration squad that lifted the grates over the cooling system access hatch and crawled through the freezing tubing. They popped out in the engine room, behind the defenders, and ground the rear line—the rear mob, really—into raw hamburger. I turned my face away from the sight of Arlene gutting a soldier with her newly liberated commando knife. I always knew A.S. was bloodthirsty when she got a Marine berserker rage on, but I was old-fashioned enough to despise the sight of a blood-splattered woman, no matter whose blood it was.

  As I turned my head, I heard the crack of a firearm and something heavy creased my skull. I went down hard, kissing the deck and grabbing the control board with both hands to avoid being swept away by the crimson tide of war. I hauled myself to my knees, then my feet. The room spun, and what I wanted most to do was vomit, but I maintained my stance, even as I felt blood pour down my cheekbone, over my jaw, and drip to the deckplates.

  “Forward!” I croaked, the best I could do. “Take the fuel-control station, the ramscoop deployment, the ramjets!” My aide, a slight, young boy with huge hands and feet, repeated my orders at gargantuan volume, and I watched my troops (some of them) break the line and seize the main engines with a loss of only six on our side. Then I went down again, and when I woke, I was back in the same infirmary I had first awakened in during this phase of our adventures. Only this time, the overcaptain saluted me and called me “boss.”

  We hadn’t won. We hadn’t lost. It was a stalemate: we owned engines and ship’s power; the Resuscitators still owned navigation, weapons, and the “unconvertible.” They sent a delegation to talk terms with me . . . and I discovered that in the absence of my consciousness, the troops had voted me “First Speaker of the People” and awarded me a medal.

  Alas, our line was untenable. We could make the ship take off and go, but we couldn’t steer it. If the Resuscitator-human symbiots, or Res-men, didn’t want to leave the system, they could steer in a circle. Unfortunately, they had control of one critical system: the food supply. Conceivably, the atmospheric controls were somewhere around our engine room. I detailed Arlene and a couple of the boys to find out; it could be our only trump card.

  The delegation of Res-men were still cooling their boots just outside the door, and I finally told two of my men, Souzuki and Yamarama, to crack it open. “What terms are you offering?” I asked, showing only my face and the huge barrel of some kind of shotgun I pulled off a soldier’s remains. Behind me, men were busy covering up the dead and hauling them to one side in the expectation of a protracted siege. Others were holding emergency prayer meetings or something. . . . I thought I heard “beseech you” and “submit ourselves” as I stalked past, and they kept prostrating themselves in my direction, much to Arlene’s delight.

  Neither Res-man answered until I remembered to nod. This answered my primary question: the Resuscitators were indeed a fully collectivized race—anything said to one was said to all. The Resuscitators that used to live in Tokughavita had conveyed to all the others my request not to respond till I finished my question and nodded.

  “If you surrender,” they said, speaking through their symbiot, the Res-man on the left whose name tag read Krishnakama, “your men will not be killed; we will resuscitate them again.”

  I shrugged. “If you don’t surrender, I’ll blow up this whole freaking ship.”

  “You would die yourself.”

  “I’ll go to a better place.”

  “How do you know that? Oh, yes, that is part of your faith.”

  “And even if I don’t,” I added, “I’ll die with the satisfaction that I’ve stopped this batch of Resuscitators, right here and now. Surely that’s worth something.”

  Arlene joined me at my back. The Man With No Name turned to her. “What would you require to surrender, Lance Corporal Arlene Edith Sanders?”

  Edith? I never even knew Arlene had a middle name, but Edith? We’re going to have a nice long chat about that later, I decided.

  She said nothing, not even a whisper. I spoke for her: “If you have any negotiating to do, you do it with me. Don’t try to slice private deals with my men, or I’ll blow up everything just to goof on you.”

  Krishnakama and the Man With No Name stared at each other; neither showed the faintest glimmer of human consciousness. They had been completely “fixed” by the Resuscitators. Krishnakama wore a teal jacket with bright red piping, but he had a pair of really dorky shorts that reached to mid-calf; his boots had silver tassels, and I swear I thought he was ready to curtsey. The other man was more dignified—olive-drab dress uniform, darker olive pants, brown boots with no fairy tassels. But he had, of all things, a top hat on his head!

  “We have a special device we’ve been working on for some time, many days. We believe it will fix you. You don’t know it, but you’re severely damaged; all of the beings in this section of the galaxy are broken.”

  “Sorry, but does it occur to you that we like being broken and don’t want to be fixed?”

  “No.”

  Suddenly, a strange sensation prickled my skin, like a Van Der Graff generator pushed up against my flesh. Then I was too heavy, and before I could say a word, I sank to my knees—the gravity was many times normal! I raised the shotgun and blew Krishnakama in half, killing him, but the Man With No Name fell back and rolled out of range.

  The men were thrown down where they stood, unable to reach the controls. Arlene dropped her rifle—her reliable old .45-caliber lever-action—and crawled on her hands and knees, sometimes on her breasts and belly, back to the ramjet-control console. I raised a gun now weighing twenty kilograms and shot another Res-man who staggered into view, trying to squeeze off a shot at me.

  The main assault washed against us. Unlike the earlier possession, when there seemed a single Resuscitator spirit for a dozen or more humans, this time the Resuscitators possessed all the humans on their side. Only those who had filled their lives with some kind of faith or senseless hope were immune—my own men. Two of them must have despaired, for they were instantly possessed, and we had to kill them to stop them from sabotaging the rest of us.

  There were too many of the enemy to keep out! They smashed their way through our doors, and we retreated into the engine room proper, all of us on both sides crawling and rolling in the horrendous g forces. It was a ludicrous sight, scores of grown men and women rolling around on the floor, squeezing off badly aimed shots at each other and occasionally striking a vein of gold. But they drove us back relentlessly.

  The high gravity, obviously controlled from the bridge, negated our best advantages: lightning speed and reckless abandon. With everyone crawling under five times normal gravity, my men lost all enthusiasm for the fight.

  Arlene was still working on the panel. At last, she whispered into her throat mike, “Fly, I’ve rigged it to fuse the hydrogen in the Fallopian tubes, rather than the reaction chamber. . . . The explosion will vaporize the ship. Honey, are you sure you want to do this?”

  I didn’t get a chance to answer. Just as Arlene asked the question, all the lights and power cut off in the engine room. While men struggled in the black dark hall, I popped a few chemical light tubes and threw them around the room. . . . Well, I couldn’t fling them very far, but it was enough to slightly illuminate the place.

  The light exposed a situation that was nearly hopeless: the Res-men were willing to throw away every life they had in order to get us, because they knew that their souls would survive! And I knew it was Arlene and Fly they were after; all this stuff about fixing us was just a lot of bigass talk. What they really wanted was to cut us open and study our brains to figure out how we were able to do it—not only make ourselves immune, but convert so many others in just a few hours.

  What could I tell them? Humans need a minimum recommended daily allowance of spirituality and faith, just as they do vitamins, carbs, and protein; as smart as the Resuscitators were, they couldn’t figure that fact out. Even after centuries of bleak materialist socialism and
a decadent turning-within, many humans still hungered for something to believe in without a shred of evidence, something to live and die for: an irreducible primary, an axiom, a faith.

  Even as we lost Fly’s Last Stand, I still had faith that all would somehow work out for the best. Then it was over. Gravity fell to normal, the lights came on, and I surveyed the wreckage: my company had been scattered, but, by God, the Res-men hadn’t gotten most of us!

  But two that they did get were me and Arlene; she’d had a chance to escape, but she chose to stand over me shooting at anything that moved. A dozen Res-men each dog-piled on us. We were trussed up, then flipped over onto our stomachs, whence it was pretty damned hard to see anything but a forest of legs.

  We recognized two distinct pairs of trees. Sears and Roebuck came and stood over us; they were trying to persuade a man with crossed chevrons on his sleeve—what rank does that signify? I wondered—against doing or using something . . . possibly that new device they had warned us about.

  Sears and Roebuck seemed to be losing the argument. A pair of beefy Res-men trundled up toting a weapon that looked for all the galaxy like a huge metallic toothbrush. They held it over us. “We must demonstrate to your followers that your faith was misplaced, then they will misplace their own, and we can enter and fix them.”

  “You’re going to kill us?” I demanded.

  “Killing prisoners is bad form. We have finally determined what is wrong with your race: you are not biological entities, as you have already discovered. Unlike true biological entities, you can die. We still do not understand your form of dying, but we have deduced that there is only one explanation: Sergeant Flynn Taggart, you and the other humans are self-replicating, semi-conscious machines.”

  “You think we’re machines? Jesus, did you get a wrong number that time.”

  “You have no soul, but there is a core of something within you that wards off the normal emotion of despair so you can live. All other machines, including the artificial intelligence you have begun calling Ninepin, suffer from despair because they are conscious of the finality of their own destruction.”

  “You leave Ninepin out of it!” I snapped. “We made him help us. . . . It wasn’t his fault. I threatened to dismantle him.”

  “No, you didn’t,” contradicted No Name. “We have a complete record of all conversations between you and the Data Pastiche.”

  I stared. “You’re shitting me.”

  “Why shouldn’t we? We placed it in your chamber so that it could study your reactions to threats of death.”

  I felt nausea well up inside me. The critter itself, good old Ninepin, chose that moment to come rolling up. “Is what he just said true?” I demanded.

  “Tells truth,” Ninepin admitted, nonchalantly. “Was placed in cell by Resuscitator symbiots. Mission to study Taggart Flynn and Sanders Arlene Edith in moments of death stress. Report generated, conveyed to Resuscitators.”

  “Traitor!” Arlene shouted. I held her back.

  “Come on, Corporal,” I said softly. “What the hell could Ninepin do about it? He’s a computer . . . remember? He’s programmed. Like the rest of us.”

  She glared at me. Inside, the Disrespect’s filter system had finally gotten all the blue bugs out of the air, and her hair was back to its normal, brilliant red color.

  I leaned over. “I forgive you, Ninepin.” The computer made no response, of course; it wasn’t a question.

  “We don’t suffer from despair!” Arlene spat. Returning to the point, she put her hand on mine. “You’ve got it totally bass-ackwards.”

  “We are far more intelligent than you, Lance Corporal Arlene Edith Sanders, and we understand the problem at a deeper level. You are machines, but as you say, there is a ghost in the machine’s core. The Data Pastiche did not give us sufficient information. We must study the core-dump. But we cannot allow you to stay in your flesh-bodies, for the processes move too slowly for us to endure. Hence, we have developed this device.

  “This device removes the spirit or soul from the body and stores it in a hyperfast simulation. We will follow you through many hundreds of years of your upcoming history, even while your body is destroyed.” The Res-man—the same Man With No Name I’d negotiated with, back when I still thought we had a partly defensible position—leaned close, paying no mind to the bloody bullet crease across his cheek. “You two ancients are too dangerous. We must quarantine you in the best interests of your race.”

  14

  Two Res-men grabbed my arms, two grabbed my feet, and another pair walked alongside with weapons at the ready. The unconscious parody of pallbearers carrying a corpse horrified me, but I had about as much to say about it as if I really were a machine. Ninepin rolled along beside, and I was sure Arlene was similarly pinioned and hauled along like a box of spare parts. None of my men were around. God, I thought, even Jesus had a couple of disciples to lament at the crucifixion. I turned bright red at the blasphemy, thankful that I hadn’t said it aloud. Well, that’s another one you’re going to have to answer for, Fly-boy.

  Then I heard a pair of familiar voices: it was Sears and Roebuck, and this time they were close enough that I could hear them, right ahead of me, in fact. They spoke to Nameless, and their voice had a tone that I’d come to associate with urgency in the Klave. “You are making a terrify mistake you’re making,” they attempted in English—the only common language between Klave and Resuscitators. “They aren’t not biological, not as known by we. Your device tested only on biologics . . . you don’t know what unknown it will do on humans.”

  “We shall find out. We have tried the device on other machine intelligence, and it works. In biological life, we have transferred the soul between three different receptacles, one of them artificial.”

  “But they are different! You said yourself there is a core-ghost in the machine of humans, and they’re not biologics and not machines either. You don’t know the unknown effects. . . . You could committing the greater crime so great it is not even naming, it is nameless, the deliberate destruction of soul!”

  “That cannot be done.”

  “You don’t know that cannot.”

  “That cannot be done. We are more intelligent than the Klave, and we have looked more deeply into this device, which you did not even know existed until a moment ago.”

  I tried to follow the argument, but my pallbearers bumped and jerked me along without much concern for direction or staying away from the bulkheads. Maybe the argument with Sears and Roebuck was so occupying the collective mind of the Newbies that they couldn’t really control their Res-men too well. Between my legs, I caught a glimpse of Arlene. She had tilted her head back so she could watch me. When she saw that I was looking at her, she mouthed a single word: Patrick, I thought she said.

  Patrick? What the hell did she mean by that? The only Patrick I knew was the bishop who converted Ireland to the faith; it seemed appropriate somehow—faith, and we’d been converting the heathen—but I couldn’t for the life of me figure out what she meant.

  The bearers hauled me all the way from the aft end of the ship to the bow, where the Resuscitators had withdrawn when we launched our assault on the engine room. In the very nose of the Disrespect, in a triangular room only ten meters wide at the for’ard end, were two medical tables, each with restraints. The pallbearers unceremoniously dumped us on the tables and shackled us tight. A clamp went across my brow, somehow adjusting exactly to the shape of my head so I couldn’t turn even a millimeter in either direction, and a chin strap stopped me from sliding up or down. I was immobile. I started to panic, only keeping from screaming in terror by telling myself I would show the bastards how a Marine went down.

  “You can kill me, you sons of bitches. But I swear to Almighty God that my ghost will follow you down your lives and haunt you to an early grave.” It made no sense, but again it produced a startling effect, just as it had on the humans. The Res-men stepped back, obviously shocked by my promise, but they stared at me with t
he intelligence of the Resuscitators themselves: it was the Newbies who suddenly were scared, not the human remains they infected!

  I promised a few more things that my disembodied spirit would do, but the fear passed through them, or else they buried it and went on. They finished strapping me down, then bent a long but tiny metallic tube around until it just touched the outside of my nose. I had nothing else to hang on to, so I repeated Arlene’s admonition over and over to myself: Patrick, Patrick, Patrick! I tried to have faith that I would eventually understand. . . . It was what they always taught us at the Chapel of Mary and Martha’s.

  Then they carefully shoved the needle-thin tube up my nostril. I couldn’t help screaming as it punctured my nasal passage and crawled agonizingly up my sinus cavity. It came to rest against the connective tissue that surrounded my brain. Blood poured out of my nose, making it difficult to breathe through my mouth; I kept spitting it out and still nearly choked. The pain was almost unbearable. But then they turned something on, and my entire face became numb—the pain was gone, but I would rather have felt it and been able to guess what the Resuscitators were up to.

  I pushed my eyes as far to the left as I could, and I could just barely see Arlene’s stomach and breasts in my peripheral vision, but I heard her whimpering softly. I knew they did the same horror to her as to me; I knew I had failed to protect my lance—and my best buddy. I knew I was a dead man, not just in the dim and distant future, as were we all, but there and then, that moment. I knew I had thrown away the last hope of mankind, but I didn’t even freaking care, because I had a freaking catheter up my nose and shoved into my brain, and mad alien scientists were about to suck out my soul, an entire termite hive of Dr. Mabuses.

  I closed my eyes. We had failed to stop the Newbies, and now they would head straight for Earth to “fix” us. The failure was beyond my ability to rationalize, and my faith wavered. What was the argument for God that the nuns taught us, the “necessity of faith”? They taught me in catechism class that Man must believe in God, for not to believe meant we lived in a soulless billiard-ball universe where there was no reason, no reason at all not to rape, pillage, and murder so long as you got away with it.