“You’re going to laugh,” she gloomily predicted.
“Laugh?”
“It’s really stupid.”
“Hey, I’ve got an idea—instead of reporting on your report, why don’t you just give me your report?”
“Oh, thanks, Sweetie, pull rank. All right, but you’re going to freak.”
I put my hands on Arlene’s hard, almost masculine shoulders. “Kiddo, I’m going to tear you apart like a wishbone if you don’t spit it out. Where have you been the last two days?”
“Here.”
“Yes, yes, in the UAC labyrinth. But how did you get this far? I barely did it last time—more luck than anything else. How did you make it without a scratch?”
“No, here here—right here, where you’re standing.”
“You appeared here?”
“On this very X.”
I stared, confused. “But why? I appeared back at the entrance.”
“Why?” she asked, turning the spotlight back on yours truly.
“Hell, I don’t know! Ask the goddamned Newbies.”
She smiled and turned up her hands. “How should I know why I appeared here? I knew you only had one way to go—down—so I figured I’d just sit tight and wait, rather than stomp all around the place and risk maybe passing you in the dark.”
“The pinkies didn’t smell you?”
She laughed, a musical tone not too different from a silver glockenspiel. “Of course they did! They’ve been up and down this freaking hallway so many times, I’m surprised they didn’t dig a trench with their feet. I just ducked inside my hole here whenever I heard them coming; they’re not exactly light on their feet.”
We looked up the corridor to where Slink hovered at the doorway, her ear cocked for the sounds of the minotaurs at the center of the labyrinth, the hell princes. Even from where I stood, I heard them screaming and growling, stomping up and down. “They can tell there’s something wrong nearby,” I whispered in Arlene’s ear, “but if they really knew we were here, I think they’d already have come charging out.”
“They didn’t charge me last time I was here, and I made a lot of noise. Didn’t notice me until I went through that door and down the stairs. I think they don’t hear too well, and they’re used to a lot of noise from the pinkies anyway.”
“But they smell something, right?”
Arlene wrinkled her freckled nose and grimaced. “Mainly what they ought to smell is spiney! Don’t take this wrong, Sarge, but your new platoon stinks to high heaven.”
I looked left and right along the dank stone hallway, stones piled on top of each other without any sign of mortar or cement. I looked at my platoon—not as good as Marines, sure, but could anyone do better? “This is what you meant by saying ‘Patrick,’ isn’t it?”
“Patrick? What the hell are you talking about?”
“Just before the Newbies sucked our brains out. You looked at me and said ‘Patrick,’ and I figured you meant to convert the monsters, like Saint Pat converted the Irish heathens.”
She lowered her orange brows, not following the turn of conversation. “I said ‘battery,’ not Patrick, you idiot!”
I glared in annoyance. “You didn’t mean I should convert the demons?”
Arlene waited so long I thought she had fallen asleep. “Fly,” she said at last, patiently, as if to a child, “how would I have known the Newbies were going to send us here?”
“Oh,” I said, face turning ruddy, “I guess I didn’t think of that.”
“I said battery—find the battery, the power source. . . . There has to be some connection, a hard connection, between the RAM we’re running in as programs and the bus, the motherboard, whatever you want to call it; the thing that everything else plugs into!”
I shook my head. “How do you know they use that kind of configuration in this computer?”
“I don’t know, but they probably use something like it! This intense and fast a simulation—remember what the Resuscitators said about wanting everything to move fast?—that sucks a lot of juice. Basically, the faster you want to go, the more energy you need, and it’s got to come from somewhere.”
“All right, so there’s a power source. So what? We can’t shut it off—we’d die.”
Arlene blew air out her closed lips in exasperation. “We don’t shut it off! That’s our key, that’s the door. . . . If we can piggyback the datastream that defines us inside this simulation onto that energy flow, we can back out of this freaking place and into the rest of the computer, maybe even into the operating system of the Resuscitator ship.”
“You think we’re on the ship? Why?”
She shrugged, looking so much like Arlene I got chills. “What else are they going to do, hang around the rock we just left? What’s Skinwalker to them? It’s probably just the nearest planetary system to Newbie prime. Why else would they decide to come here?”
“Well . . . the Newbie we had on the Disrespect was part of the invasion fleet that wiped out the Fred; what if . . . what if they came to Skinwalker for a more important reason?”
“What?”
“Maybe they came here in search of us?” She stared, not saying a word, so I continued. “Maybe they picked up some mention of us and our so-called nonbiological status, and how much that scared the Freds, when they annihilated them. So then they went out hunting for us. Maybe they knew this was our nearest base; maybe there was some record among the Freds.”
“Couldn’t have gotten here in time. We came on a lightspeed ship—no message could come faster, and there was no settlement here when we left Earth, anyway.”
I shrugged. “They were on their way here, though. Our prisoner said so!” Arlene slowly shook her head, eyes closed, then she massaged the bridge of her nose.
No question, this really, truly was my buddy; every mannerism was exactly right. The Arlene Sanders in this computer world wasn’t just an alien program designed to fool me: somehow, the Res-men really had built a device that sucked her soul out and trapped it here. Until I had found her, I had my doubts.
I stared up at Slink, who looked tense but not frantic. Evidently, the gruesome red fiends were still agitated but hadn’t yet decided to investigate. “Hey Lance, you really want to charge through that door and fight the hell princes?” I asked.
“Not particularly, Fly-boy.”
“How’s about we set the spineys and the zombie to making this crack wide enough for all of us?”
Arlene raised one eyebrow—an expression she had practiced night and day for months because of some television character who did it. “Highly logical, Captain.”
I recoiled in horror. “Good God, don’t commission me as an officer! Officers have to go to college, and you know what I think of college grads.” She ought to; I’d only spelled it out a thousand times! See, at Parris Island, I was an assistant DI when I first made corporal. You give a recruit an order, and even if he doesn’t understand it, he will, by God, run off and try to do something.
But Gunnery Sergeant Goforth used to be a DI over at Quantico in the Marine Corps Officer Candidate School, and he told us that when he gave an officer candidate an order that the kid didn’t understand, he would stand there like a dummy and try to clarify it! “Sir, this candidate does not understand the drill instructor’s order!” Gunny Goforth went bugfreak trying to get the candidates to do something, anything, anything but just stand there and discuss the situation!
The gunny especially hated, when he gave an order, the sort of rummy way the candidate would just say “sir?”—with a look of utter bewilderment—like he’d never even heard of such a command. Like no one had ever heard of such a command . . . like nobody in his right mind would ever dream of issuing such a bizarre command! “You falkin’ piece of shee-it! Just falkin’ pick up th’ falkin’ FOD off’n th’ falkin’ RUNway and don’ falkin’ say another falkin’ ‘SIR,’ or I’s gone to rip your falkin’ HAID off and YOU-rinate down yo’ neck!” Gunny Goforth was from South Carolin
a, and his hatred of college-educated officer candidates was legendary.
It was the college education; I was morally certain of it. They say college teaches you how to think, but I think it really teaches you how to jerk gunnery sergeants around by the short hairs.
I whistled very low, catching everyone’s attention. I set Olestradamus to guard the door instead of Slink, and all the spineys—and Pfc. Dodd—came forward to tear down the wall, or enough of it that we could all escape the way Arlene did last time. I’d deliberately kept him in the shadows. I wasn’t sure how Arlene would react to her former lover, now zombie.
I wished I could have softened the blow somewhat. Maybe I handled it all wrong. When Arlene saw Dodd, she turned white, paler than usual, so much so it was easily visible in the gloom. She fell back against the wall and started hyperventilating, staring at him.
This wasn’t the first time she had seen Dodd as a zombie. We caught up with him the last time on Deimos, just after jumping through the Gate—the same Gate that was just outside the crack we were working on. That time, he shambled out of the blackness ready to blow us apart, reworked so thoroughly he didn’t even recognize his once and future intended.
I was sick back then, sick at heart. I knew I would have to kill the SOB, and Arlene would hate me forever, and hate herself for hating me when I only did what I had to do. But a miracle happened, the first one I’d seen on that trip, but not the last. Arlene suddenly found it inside herself to shove me out of the way and kill zombie-Dodd herself; that way, she couldn’t really hate anybody.
It was a hell of a thing for her to do, one of the reasons I love her so much, my best bud. Now . . . what did this mean, now we had Pfc. Wilhelm Dodd as one of our crew? But a Dodd who not only didn’t remember sleeping with Arlene and loving her, but also didn’t remember being killed by her. But Arlene remembered, God help her. She remembered killing her boyfriend. She blew his head off and watched the body topple like a dead tree.
“Christ,” she muttered beneath her breath, closing her eyes and turning away. “Christ, Fly. Did you have to run into . . . into him?”
I didn’t know whether Albert made it easier or harder. She had thought she loved Dodd until she met Albert Gallatin. But maybe her feelings for Albert were colored by what she’d done to Dodd, and what we all were sharing: the destruction of our planet and our entire race. At least, I knew those thoughts were firing through her brain; if I could think them with my limited mental capacity for speculation, sure as hell Arlene was obsessing about them herself.
She swallowed the emotions down and became a Marine again. Dodd wasn’t Dodd; he was a zombie . . . and now a platoon member. She did what she had to do. She was a U.S. Marine—semper fi, Mac.
The spiney imps got busy ripping away at the masonry; Arlene and I tried to help, but human hands simply weren’t strong enough to do the dirty work. We caught stones as they fell and lugged them away, trying to make as little noise as possible; the pinkies were damned noisy as a rule, and the hell princes should be used to the noise . . . but still, the last thing I wanted—
We almost, damn near made it. Slink and the other spineys—Whack, Swaller, Sniff and Chomp—used their iron nails to grind away at the crack, scraping stone away. It was already wide enough for me and Arlene (and Dodd, of course), and nearly so for the imps, but the pumpkin Olestradamus was a big problem: I snapped my fingers until I got his—her?—attention and gestured it over. “Can you deflate?” I asked. It didn’t say anything but looked puzzled. “I mean, is there any way you can suck in a little at the sides, like, and squeeze through that crack?”
Olestradamus floated closer to the hole and stared through it. The pumpkin had not yet spoken; I only knew I had converted it by the fact that it no longer opened its mouth and spat lightning balls at me.
This is how the scene happened: we’d been battling the pumpkin in a small room, Slink and Chomp and I, taking cover behind a stone couch built for some gigantic monster with a really hard butt. While the pumpkin floated to each corner of the room, firing lightning balls at us from every conceivable angle, we screamed out our spiel about the simulation. I almost bit my tongue in half when Slink shouted out, “Masssster sshall produce miracle! Then you sshall know!” It wasn’t exactly like I could just close my eyes and envision a vase of flowers appearing in the middle of the room! What was I supposed to do, suddenly “remember” that the water in the fountain was really wine?
Sure, kid, sure, that would be great . . . only it didn’t work that way. I couldn’t “remember” something so totally different because my real memory got in the way. Maybe if I were one of Arlene’s religious teachers, the ones she was forever reading about—Bodhisatvas, something like that—maybe I could perfectly visualize a Fredworld where pumpkins were only beachballs, imps were crash-test dummies, and the pinkies all wore monkey suits and served cocktails.
But I was just Flynn Taggart, and I had too good a memory to play that game. Alas, I remembered just how bad-tempered the pumpkins were . . . and this one was proving how damned good my memory was with every electrical belch. I wished that somehow Sears and Roebuck had been transferred with me; I sure could have used those gigantic Magilla Gorilla arms to pop that overinflated monster.
And then an astonishing thing happened. While the pumpkin was floating around the blue-glowing room, with flickering light from several shredded light tubes, it managed to wedge itself into the small space between the stone couch and a shred of illuminating panel on the ceiling. Trying to extricate itself, the pumpkin managed to rotate so that its mouth was pointed directly skyward.
Then, in frustration, seeing us in the corner of its peripheral vision, so close, touching distance—the dweebie pumpkin fired a round . . . directly up into the powerful circuitry. The short-circuit in the light tube must have acted like a capacitor, because there was a violent spark-flinging feedback loop, and the pumpkin ended up taking a jolt that must have been a hundred times the amperage of its own lightning, judging by the acrid smell of ozone.
The zap scrambled every neural circuit in the pumpkin’s brain. It must have blown through all of its metaprogramming, letting me reach right down into the deepest part of its brain and convert it on the spot—like it had seen God directly, that’s how it responded. I turned it, we became friends. Turns out the things can talk, they just don’t have much to say (too full of hot air, hah hah). Their voices are at the extreme low end of the frequency range of a human ear. Olestradamus sounded like Darth Vader played on a tape running half-speed.
But now I waited expectantly for Olestradamus to answer. After a long moment staring out the crack, it rotated to face us and sadly said, “N-n-no. C-c-c-annn-not fit.” I wondered if I had the only pumpkin who stuttered, or if that were a racial characteristic of all pumpkins.
Olestradamus rotated to return to its post and froze: standing in the doorway was a hell prince. The freaking thing had finally decided to go upstairs and check on the weird silence . . . and with amazing foresight, it had chosen the exact instant that the door was unguarded!
The hell prince recovered before I did. It raised its arm and fired a blast of the greenish energy beam from a wrist launcher. But Olestradamus was faster! I wouldn’t have believed it possible; I’d never seen a pumpkin move so quickly. But it was in between us and the hell prince fast enough to catch the blow meant for Arlene.
Olestradamus screamed in rage and pain, and returned fire with the lightning balls. I turned back to Arlene. “Move your gorgeous ass, A.S.!” Unceremoniously, I grabbed her by the butt and scruff of the neck and propelled her through the hole, dumping her face-first a dozen feet down into what sounded like squishy mud.
“Slink, Whack, Chomp, Dodd—punch it, through the gap!”
My apostles squeezed through the gap, which was almost wide enough for a spiney, and followed Arlene to the ground. I hoped to hell she had shaken off enough daze to roll out of the way before the two-hundred-kilogram spineys dropped on her head.
I leveled my shotgun, we were at such close quarters, and tried to get a shot around Olestradamus, but the pumpkin was too fat, too round! It and the hell prince were going at it—well, I was going to say fang and claw, but I guess it was actually mouth and wrist launcher. God, but the two races must have hated each other. But why? I remembered seeing hell-prince bodies lining the walls of one pumpkin chamber and dead deflated pumpkins strewn about the floor of another hall owned by hell princes. I guessed the only two creatures that hated each other more were steam demons and the spidermind.
They were both pretty torn up. Olestradamus blocked the entire passageway, and the hell prince effectively filled the doorway, which was a good thing, because I could just glimpse the second hell prince behind the first—but he couldn’t get off a shot around his compatriot.
“Come on, forget it!” I bellowed. “We’re through. . . . Pull back and hide—convert your brothers!” But Olestradamus didn’t hear; it was too busy teaching its mortal enemy what it meant to incur the wrath of a pumpkin.
And then I heard the sound I most dreaded: the flatulent noise of an inflated pumpkin popping, meeting its airy doom. Olestradamus collapsed into a huddled heap of rubbery flesh on the floor. It belched no more lightning.
We had our first martyr on the holy quest to punish the false ones.
I stepped back into the shadows of the crack. The stupid hell prince had gotten so fixated on killing its race enemy that it had entirely forgotten about me and the rest of the crew. It staggered forward, obviously ninety percent dead on its feet.
I was happy to supply the missing tenth. As it crouched unsteadily over the body of our loving Olestradamus, the most intelligent inflated floater I had ever known, I raised my duck gun and unloaded a shell at point-blank range into the hell prince’s temple. I only wished I still had the beloved double-barreled shotgun I had carried through the entire campaign on Earth.
I guess Olestradamus must have torn up the hell prince more than I thought. I expected the creature to be hurt; but hell, one just like it had taken a shot directly amidships with a rocket, for Pete’s sake, and lived. But this one didn’t; it dropped heavily, groaning . . . and ten seconds later, it was dead, green blood and gooshie brain goo dribbling out its head.
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