The other came charging out, but it was too late; I stepped back once more, launching myself through the crack and down about five meters to the wet peat below. I fell hard, stunning myself. As I came back to consciousness a moment later, I found I had made a giant-size mud angel.
The hell prince stood at the crack and tried to fire through it, but we ran under the overhanging piece of building, completely unhittable. Thank the devil our intrepid imps hadn’t made the hole any bigger; the hell prince was only just barely too big to fit.
Arlene steadied me, and I told the crew what had happened to poor Olestradamus. Arlene made the same point about him, her, it being a martyr, and I explained the concept to Slink for later processing to the other apostles.
Above us was sky, horribly enough; we had come down more than two kilometers through the solid rock of Phobos . . . and here, at the bottom, directly overhead we saw the stars! It made no geographic sense, but, of course, it didn’t have to—it was nothing but computer software, after all.
Across the field, I saw the raised platform that was the Gate. I pointed. “Well, men, I hate to say it, but if we’re going to find that power source, we’d better get the hell off Phobos.”
Arlene raised her eyebrows, then shrugged. “Well, sayonara, Phobos. And I was so looking forward to a more extended visit.”
Yeah, right, A.S.
17
Marines are like cats. They sleep lightly, half an eye peeled for charlie, sniffing the air like a huge carnivorous tiger that’s always hungry. They can fall asleep standing up, in zero-g, during reentry, even while marching on the flipping parade ground. Don’t ever try to sneak up on a Marine; Jesus the Anointed One walking on the water makes enough racket to jerk a Marine awake from a sound sleep. And when a Marine wakes up, he’s on his feet in one fluid movement, rifle in hand, fully alert in less time than the fastest microprocessor takes to execute a single machine-code command.
Except me, that is. Fly Taggart wakes up not remembering his own name, bleary and groggy, eyelids glued shut with little pieces of sleep. I stagger like one of the Fred-worked zombies with a mouth full of cotton, inarticulately begging and pleading for some life-giving coffee. Usually it takes two recruits and a burly Pfc. to slap some sense into me in the morning.
This time, it took a scared lance corporal. Arlene snapped me out of my coma by the simplest possible means: she started kicking me in the ribs, gently at first, getting harder and harder, until at last I blindly reached out a meaty ham-fist and caught her ankle in mid-kick. Without waking more than halfway, I jerked her off her feet and snarled something about not tickling a man when he’s trying to get some Z’s.
Then I blinked awake. I sat up on a blue-specked dirt patch overgrown with clumps of sharp, brittle, blue grass that seemed to undulate, though I couldn’t quite tell for sure. Arlene picked herself up, brushing the dirt from her uniform and rubbing her knee. “Damn you, Sarge!” she stage-whispered. “I was just trying to get up quietly.”
Taking my cue from the lance corporal, I kept my own voice low. “What the hell is going on? Last thing I remember, I was strapped to a table and the Newbies were trying to suck my brains out with a vacuum cleaner.”
I stared around. Arlene and I sat atop a small hill that faintly rippled. In the distance, I saw the human-built ship, the Disrespect to Death-Bringing Deconstructionists. It was even smaller than I imagined, utterly dwarfed by my memory of the Fred ship. I would still love to see them side by side, though. The Disrespect looked far sleeker and more elegant.
In all other directions was a flat plain, broken only by immensely tall thin trees. They swayed so easily, though, in the faintest air current, that maybe they were just very tall grass.
Blue was the color of the day. I knew for a fact that the desert we had walked across from the Fred ship was brownish gray, with not a trace of blue. I bent down and looked close at the ground: the blue specks that colored the entire terrain were actually tiny bugs! Almost microscopic insects swarming over everything—over me and Arlene, even. I cringed for a moment; I’ve always hated bugs. But there wasn’t anything I could do about it, and I didn’t feel any pain. Alas, even Ninepin had deserted us. I had no idea where he had got to, but he was gone, the inadvertent little traitor.
“Arlene—”
“Yeah, I know. You can’t even brush ’em off; they’re too small. I figure they must eat microbes, so maybe they’re not all bad.”
“Arlene, where the hell are we?”
She shrugged. The blue critters in her bright red hair turned her head purple. “Near as I can deduce, Fly, the Resuscitators tried to suck our souls out; my nose still hurts like hell.”
Now that she mentioned it, I realized my own sinuses felt like some combat engineer was cranking a hand drill inside. “But we’re still here—I think. Do you feel any different?”
She shook her head. “Nada. Whatever kind of soul I had before, it sure feels the same now.” Then she turned her head and squinted in the direction of the ship. “On the other hand, would we even know if it was changed?”
I started to stand, but she put out a hand and held me down to a crouch. “Fly, they’re down there, bottom of the hill.”
“Who?”
“Your converts—the fourteen still left alive who didn’t despair and get reinfected. Sears and Roebuck are down there, too—their bodies. The freaking Newbies killed them to shut them up—they wouldn’t stop arguing about them using the machine, and then when the Res-men started sucking out your soul, S and R actually attacked them!”
“Jesus! Kill anyone?”
“I couldn’t believe their strength. Their little legs spun like a gyroscope . . . you know how they chug so fast, their legs are just blurs? They dashed around the room at high velocity, breaking necks and crushing skulls with those powerful Magilla Gorilla arms of theirs. It was beautiful!”
“How many did they get?”
“At least eight Res-men murdered while they stupidly tried to aim their shots. You can’t hit something moving that fast by aiming at it!”
“You got to lead it.”
“Yeah, but which way? Sears and Roebuck kept changing direction so fast, I thought I was looking at a UFO! So finally one of the Res-men must’ve got an infusion of brains from the Newbie molecules infecting her; she grabbed a laser cannon and just held the trigger in while she swept the beam back and forth across the room, fast as she could. Did you know Klave can jump like mofos?”
“They can probably run up the walls, with the speed they’re capable of.”
“But she finally got them. Cut the boys down on the downbeat.”
I blinked. Man, I’m out for five minutes, and look what I miss! It was like going out for popcorn, and when you get back, the giant ants are already devouring Austin. “Christ, then what?”
“Then they finished with you like nothing happened, and they started on me, and I woke up here. I was lying next to you, but you were stiff as granite, even though your heart was beating and your lungs breathing. I figured you were brain-dead . . . and I guess that’s what Tokughavita thought.”
“How do you know they’re all down there?”
“How do you think? I’m Marine Corps recon. . . . I crawled to the edge of that ridge and reconnoitered. They’re all down there in a circle—looks like they’re performing some sort of shamanic ritual. They’re bobbing their heads like pigeons.”
I crawled as quietly as I could to the ledge she indicated and looked down on our converts. I recognized the overcaptain and several of the boys. “Shamanic ritual? Jeez, Arlene, they’re praying. Haven’t you ever been to church, you heathen?”
“That’s what I said, a magical ritual.” She squirmed up beside me. I couldn’t help smiling, she felt so good. “Wonder what the hell they’re praying for?”
I stared at her, exasperated. “Probably for the safe return of our souls to our bodies, you moron.”
She raised her eyebrows and pursed her lips. “Man . . .
are you trying to tell me that stuff works?”
“Worked this time, I reckon. Come on, babe, let’s go down and scare the hell out of the natives.” We had nothing better to do, so we rose and descended majestically from the mount. When we were almost down, one of the converts shouted and pointed; his mouth moved, but no words came out. In three seconds, the rest of them had scrambled to their feet and were staring silently, stunned and awed.
I stopped where I was and spread my arms. “Behold,” I declared. “I have risen from the dead. Let this be the reward for your unwavering faith!” I felt a prickling in the back of my neck. I didn’t dare look up. . . . I knew what it was: God the Angry Father was glaring at me for my blasphemy. But it was in a good cause! We had to keep their level of faith high, so if there were any molecular Newbies floating around, they couldn’t get a toehold. Somehow, strong faith, faith in anything, seemed to stop them. Maybe it created some sort of chemical imbalance? Hell, that was for the college creeps to figure out. I just wanted to fight the bastards!
Toku and the Converts—didn’t I see them at Lollapalooza?—swarmed us like locusts on a wheat field, and Arlene kept pushing them back so they wouldn’t mob me. “Chill, chill, you clowns! Get your asses back over the line—I want you to stay at least four paces from me, or I pull out the nutcracker!”
The two of us got them simmered down enough for Tokughavita to tell us what happened after Arlene and I were killed. “Didn’t know what to do,” he explained, turning up his hands. “Said you were dead, souls gone. Believed—saw no signs of life in eyes!”
“I don’t get it,” I said. “Did the thing work, or didn’t it?”
“Took bodies down from tables. Resuscitators gave them to us, said they were meat only, no further use. Cast us out, said we were unfixable, ruined. Called faith ruin and fatal flaw in operating system.”
I smiled. I could just imagine the Res-men’s frustration. Suddenly, they were locked out of what had been their comfortable home, the human mind, for the last God knows how long! If I were any judge of character, the bastards were really running scared now. “So they’re still in there?” I nodded at the ship.
“Yes, master, still present, but cannot get at them. Activated all ship’s defenses.”
“So he drove out the man.”
It was a sweet voice. . . .
“And he placed at the east of the garden of Eden Cherubims, and a flaming sword which turned every way, to keep the way of the tree of life.”
I turned to Arlene, nonplussed. “I didn’t know you knew the Bible.”
“I, uh, I don’t. I just know that verse. I must have heard it in a movie or something.”
“Activated launch sequence,” continued the overcaptain. “Ship launches in thirty minutes. Should get to cover, otherwise we’ll be burned black.”
The other remnants of the Fearsome Flies grabbed all their stuff and bundled it up, but I caught myself wondering: if Arlene and I hadn’t awakened just then, would these goofs have sat right there, while the ship launched and burned them alive? I winced at the thought; they had faith, but I obviously needed to work a bit on the common-sense aspect of religion.
We stood over the bodies of Sears and Roebuck. From where I stood, the wounds didn’t look all that bad . . . but where I stood was a million klicks away from the medical lab on the Disrespect. Yet we couldn’t just leave them there! If their bodies were burned, not only would their spirits be irrevocably lost, left to wander the barren dunes and blue bug-covered plains, but they would feel every microsecond of the incineration . . . and they would remember.
“Jeez, Fly, that was a hell of an act of bravery on S and R’s part. I mean, here we are, hundreds of light-years from the Klave homeworld. They must have known the odds were slim to none that we’d be able to resuscitate them.” Arlene crouched, staring cautiously at Sears and Roebuck, unlikeliest of heroes.
An idea was starting to germinate in my brain. “Toku, you guys got a hovercar or landrover or something down here?”
He looked puzzled, scratching his chin. The hirsute overcaptain desperately needed a shave; he was starting to look like a chimpanzee balancing on its hind legs. “Don’t know. Different department.”
Yeesh, here we went again with the ultraindividualism! I gathered them around us in a circle. “All right, you proto-jarheads, did any of you drive a vehicle off that ship?” Silence, many heads shaking.
Arlene put her hand on my arm. “Excuse me, Sarge, you’re not asking that right. May I?”
I waited a moment, eyes flicking back and forth, then I grunted assent.
“Dudes,” she began, “did any of you see a vehicle on the dirt here?”
Instantly, half a dozen hands went up. The crewmen started talking all at once, but they quickly compared stories and pointed along the axis of the ship, heading aft. “About three kilometers,” explained the overcaptain.
I wanted to strangle the entire lot of literal doofuses! Drive it off the ship . . . Jeez! I glanced at Arlene, who said, “Come on, Fly, you know which of us is the better runner.”
“Take off, kiddo, and for God’s sake, make it the fastest 3 K you’ve ever run. Wait, which of you is really fast?” Every hand shot skyward. I rolled my eyes. These guys were worse than the natives on the island where everyone either always lies or always tells the truth! “Look, I know each of you is the fastest SOB in the outfit . . . so every man point at the second fastest dude.”
I had fourteen converts: six pointed at one guy, four pointed at another, and the other two pointed at each other. The two winners were startled by the sudden attention and didn’t point at anyone. “Right, you and you, follow Corporal Sanders. Move out!”
I sat down to wait, trying my damnedest to look completely calm and patient. In reality, I was about ready to chew the heads off a bag of ten-penny nails.
I was still waiting in exactly the same posture, having forced myself to be utterly still, when Arlene and the boys “drove” up twenty-one minutes later in a hovercar. By then, everyone was nervously sneaking peeks at his watch—except Overcaptain Tokughavita, the only man with utter, absolute faith in me. He knew I wouldn’t let them down, even if I had no control whatsoever over the search for the land cart!
The cart was pretty similar to the one I’d used on Phobos a couple of centuries ago, except it was big enough to collect a few tons of samples. The cart was huge and blue: ten meters from stem to stern and two meters wide, with a foldable gate around the bed. It liked to sit about six meters above the deck, maintaining altitude with some sort of air-jet arrangement, instead of the fans that levitated the land carts on Mars. The engine looked complex, and it was totally exposed, not even a cowling; I couldn’t make head or tail out of the guts. It was nothing like the fan-levs I had taken apart in the Pendleton motor pool a few years and a couple of stripes ago.
An engineer named Abumaha was watching the ship, and he announced that the tail had begun to smoke. That meant we had all of three minutes before the ship blasted into orbit.
“All hands, throw everything onto the land sled, don’t worry about the order—move!”
Arlene and I took personal charge of the bodies of Sears and Roebuck, carefully laying them atop a nice soft pile of clothing and coats. The boys (including two girls) leapt aboard, just as the tail of the ship suddenly turned too bright to look at with the naked eye. The Res-men had fired up the fusion reactor.
“Arlene,” I said softly, “get us the f out of here, okay?”
She jammed on the throttle, and I was hurled to the deck. One crewman almost tumbled out the back, but Tokughavita caught him by the hair and the scruff of his neck and hauled him back aboard. One minute later, we were already half a klick away . . . and the darkening sky suddenly lit up as bright as a dozen suns. The Disrespect was launching toward orbit.
We ran fast, faster, but the shockwave caught up with us nonetheless. It rocked the cart so viciously that Arlene backed off the throttle and pulled up to a halt. Good thi
ng. With the second jolt, I was hurled out of the land cart! I hit the ground heavily, too stunned to stand, but not too stunned to laugh at Arlene’s attempts to settle the hovercraft onto the ground to pick me up.
The ground shimmied and shook beneath me, so I stayed on my butt, my back turned to a fusion reaction bright enough to burn out my retinas in a millisecond. At last, she got the thing onto the ground, scooped me inside, and headed away again. Behind us, the ship cleared the lower atmosphere, and we stopped hearing the roar of exploding gases around the engine nozzle, hot as a stellar core. “Where to, O Exalted One?” Arlene asked.
“Where do you think? Back to the Fred ship so we can repair Sears and Roebuck. If any two can figure out a way off this rock, they can. And Arlene . . . change drivers, huh? I wouldn’t mind getting there intact.”
18
“No, no, saw them! Saw you in computer.” Overcaptain Tokughavita was struggling to convince Arlene and me that the Res-man soul-sucker really had worked as advertised.
“But we’re not in the freaking computer,” explained my lance with amazing patience, for her. “We’re sitting in this stupid hovercraft, listening to your drivel about us being sucked out of our bodies and plopped into a computer.”
Tokughavita groaned, leaning his head back and raising his arms in perhaps the most prototypical human gesture of them all—cosmic frustration. “Then who did see? Saw both of you in computer, fighting monsters right out of book.”
“Book? What book? What the hell are you—”
“Knee-Deep in the Dead and Hell on Earth,” I answered for the man. “The books that Jill wrote. They’re talking about the monsters that the Freds genetically engineered for us on Phobos and Deimos—you know, the spiney imps, steam demons, spiderminds, boneys. All the things that made life worth killing.”
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