Endgame

by Dafydd ab Hugh

  We had to walk slowly across PARI. The atmosphere was about what it would be three-quarters of the way up Mount Everest, and even a slow walk left me panting and dizzy. The apostles weren’t bothered; they said they had been “rebuilt” for greater lung capacity, among other things. Arlene and I exchanged a look. So that was why we’d had such a damned hard time trying to take down Overcaptain Tokughavita! I started to wonder uneasily what their lifespan was: they were super-strong, probably immune to most normal nonintelligent diseases, and engineered to survive on alien worlds . . . and they worshipped me as a God?

  I hoped I never disappointed them. Men don’t take kindly to fallen idols.

  It felt bizarre to be walking across an artificial moon the size of a cue ball, feeling gravity almost half that of Earth. Directly ahead a couple of klicks was a tall tower. Only the top half was visible over the horizon. The rest of the surface of the moon was a jagged series of black and white stripes, like digital zebra paint; I couldn’t see any other structures—but, of course, the entire moon of PARI was one gigantic “structure.”

  We made it to the tower from our touchdown point in just over three hours. The tower was actually three towers connected by numerous spans of metal ribbon—bridges I sincerely hoped I didn’t have to pass, since they had no visible guardrails and were plenty far enough up to kill me if I fell, even in the low gravity.

  “We, ah, don’t have to climb up there, do we?” I asked Tokughavita.

  “Not up,” he insisted. “Going down. Going down to battle fleet.”

  “Fly,” Arlene said, “you know what those towers are? They’re elevators! You can ride them up out of the atmosphere, or most of it. . . . Am I right, Blinky?”

  She and the Blink-meister had gotten quite chummy lately; I was already getting nervous. “Yeah, yeah, right up!” he agreed with sickening enthusiasm. “Go up, fast, fast, make nose bleed!”

  “Some other time, kids.” I felt like my own father twenty years ago.

  We reached the base of the middle tower, and Tokughavita walked up and—I swear to God!—pushed the down button to summon the elevator, like it was a high-rise in Manhattan instead of a tiny artificial moon orbiting an alien rock. We waited thirty-five minutes by my watch, while the floor counter slowly climbed through the negative numbers toward zero. When it reached that magic middle, the monstrous doors before us, big enough to drive an upright Delta-19 rocket through on its rolling launch pad, cranked slowly open to admit our party of eighteen. I felt distinctly underdressed; I should at least have been wearing a ten-story robot construction virtu-suit. Tokughavita scanned the array of buttons and finally pushed the one labeled C, with a little icon of a dot in the center of a circle—core, I presumed. My adrenaline level skyrocketed just before we plummeted.

  We started descending slowly, but within a minute, we were accelerating downward so close to the gravitational pull that our weight slacked off to about one percent of normal, just enough to keep the soles of our boots touching the elevator floor. We dropped sickeningly for close to forty-five minutes, so I guess the elevator hadn’t been all the way down when we rang for it.

  At last, we started slowing hard. I was almost kicked to my butt, and Arlene actually did hit the deck with a thud. It was three g’s at least! We stopped hard and fast in about five minutes, but we’d been toughened by our ship travels and we didn’t black out. Sears and Roebuck took the acceleration in stride, literally: they kept pacing up and back, impatient to see the “battle fleet” that Tokughavita talked about. I figured this must have been close to the normal gravity for a Klave.

  When the door cranked open, my breath caught in my throat. Before us was a mind-numbingly vast hollow sphere in the center of the moon, so wide in diameter I couldn’t begin even to guess its size. It was crisscrossed by hundreds of thousands of striped tubes—catwalks, presumably, connecting different areas.

  “Beware,” said the overcaptain. “Is zero-g beyond elevator. Center of mass.”

  A tube beckoned directly ahead of us. I bravely led the troops forward, my stomach pulling its usual flippy-spinny trick as soon as we left the gravity zone and entered weightlessness.

  Tokughavita wasn’t kidding about the human battle fleet. There were dozens of ships strewn around the inside of the hollow moon, too many to get an accurate estimate. Some were as short as the ship that just took off; others were longer than the Fred ship we’d hijacked to Fredworld. The nearest was about one and a half kilometers long, I reckoned. Blinky Abumaha pointed at it and said, “Damn fast ship that is, nearly fast as ship we left.”

  “Nearly?” I got worried. I knew what that meant.

  He nodded vigorously. “Damn fast. Get us to Earth only twenty days behind infested ones, counting acceleration time, if leave now.”

  Twenty days! I figured that meant about a two-week acceleration up to nearly lightspeed and deceleration to match Earth velocity, assuming the Disrespect could get up to speed and back down in three or four days each way. Jeez, a lot can happen in twenty days; to the Newbies, it may as well be forty years, at the speed they evolved. “All right, ladies and gentlemen, let’s haul butt over to the ship and stomp down on the kick-starter.”

  It was an easy “trek” to the nearest ship, provided you had a boatload of patience. Fortunately, that’s one lesson you learn double-time in the Corps. No matter how fast we get our butts out of the rack and into our combats, pull on about a ton and a half of armor, lock and load enough ammo to sink a medium-size guided-missile frigate, and bounce out to the helo pad for a quick barf-bump to the rocket, sure as hell some 0-6 forgot his coffee cup or his inflatable seat cushion, and we have to stand by six or seven hours while everyone from second-louie to short colonel turns the camp upside down trying to find it.

  You know how to move as quickly as possible along a zero-g tube, don’t you? You line yourself up as best you can right down the centerline and give a shove off’n one end. Then you wait. If you’re lucky, you get a good long trajectory down the tube until you hit a side wall. If you didn’t aim too well, you crash in a couple of dozen meters. Either way, you have to find something solid to brace against and do it again. The stripes along the tubes turned out to be metal bands with footrests to kick off from; somebody was thinking ahead . . . probably a non-com; an officer wouldn’t have the brains.

  I got used to seeing Pyrex glide past me on all sides, like I was a fish swimming through a glass sewer pipe. It only took us a couple of hours for the first guy, me, to make it all the way to the ship, but we were all spread out, and it took another thirty minutes to get back into a clump. I won’t say into a formation, because the “Jetsons”-era clowns under my command didn’t even know the meaning of the word.

  Turned out our little “reindeer games” on the Fred ship were good training. Arlene was especially grateful; she shot me a look of thanks when she cleared the transfer tube as “tail-end Charlene.” This really wasn’t her forte.

  The ship we picked was long and strangely thin. I worried a bit about feeling cramped since we would be in it for five months. It was shaped basically like a dog bone, a klick and a half long but only a hundred meters in diameter; the endcaps were bulbous, giving the ship that “bone” look: one was the thruster, the other the feeder turbine for the scooped hydrogen.

  Damn thing was cramped inside. The corridors were mostly crawlways, and they were kept at 0.1 g, according to Blinky Abumaha. The cabins faced off the crawlways, all of them long and squeezed, like a bundle of pencils. Well, what the hell; we were beggars here, shouldn’t get choosy.

  Inside, pale teal predominated with orange trim—a decorator’s nightmare. Arlene liked it for some weird reason, possibly just because it was about as far as could be from a Fred ship. I discovered that if I wore red sunglasses, they matted out the blue of the walls, making the effect odd but bearable. We dogpiled into the place and started examining controls, instruments, and engines.

  Six of the fourteen had flown one of these types of s
hips before, and between them and the networks, we got the engines hot. The only problem was we didn’t have anywhere to go! I couldn’t see a hole in any direction—and neither could the radar.

  I grabbed Tokughavita by his uniform lapel. “Okay, smart guy, how do we get out of this thing?”

  The overcaptain rubbed his chin. “Was afraid would ask question. Not sure, must consult mil-net.” He typed away at a console for a while, frowning deeper and deeper. By the time another hour had passed, I had to forcibly restrain him from ripping the terminal out with his bare hands and heaving it through the computer screen. The damned thing was command and menu driven—and Tokughavita didn’t know the query command and couldn’t find it on any of a hundred menus!

  Arlene and I went on a hunt, trying to find the rest of our crew, who had scattered to the four winds, pawing through every system on the ship to find the stuff they knew. I snagged eight and Arlene got the rest, but no one had a clue where a tunnel was or how to open it up if we found it. They had all flown on these sorts of ships before, but none of my platoon was a starship pilot! I cursed the miserable Res-men for not being soft-hearted enough to leave us Ninepin at least! Traitor or not, he was a useful font of intel.

  I dismissed most of them and called a conference with Arlene, Tokughavita, the engineer Abumaha, and Sears and Roebuck. “Boys—and you, too, A.S.—there must be some kind of emergency exit here, just in case the worst-case scenario happened, and we had to deploy everything on hand immediately. Is there a set of instruction manuals, help systems, officer-training course . . . anything?”

  Everyone shook his head. “I haven’t seen a damned thing,” Arlene said, “and I’ve been looking.”

  “The designers wouldn’t probably let such datums loose in the ships, in the event to enemy capture,” Sears and Roebuck suggested with entirely inappropriate cheer. I guessed they were happy so long as no one was shooting at them, or likely to do so in the foreseeable future.

  We kicked it around a bit, and everyone agreed we were all ignoramuses. Very productive meeting. Now I knew why officers got the big bucks. But something had been tickling the back of my brain through the whole useless disaster, something somebody had said. I ran back the conversations in my mind . . . and abruptly I realized it was something I’d said: I’d mentioned Ninepin. If only we had him—he knew everything, though his loyalty was a bit questionable!

  “Arlene, you remember what Ninepin said about how long it took to build him?”

  “Now that you bring it up, I think it was something ridiculous, like four or five hours, wasn’t it? Fly, you’re not thinking of trying to build another one . . . are you?”

  We stared at each other, struck by the same thought. “Toku, you remember that big green ball that followed us around?” I asked. “What was that?” From across the table, the overcaptain, who had zoned out and was looking out a porthole and picking his teeth, jerked back to attention. “Big green ball? Oh, yes, was Data Pastiche. Had it installed, hoped would pick up information about ancient human culture.”

  “Yeah, yeah, and it reported back to the Res-men about us. Are these Data Pastiches common? Would we find one on this ship, maybe?”

  Tokughavita shook his head. “Never saw before. Was prototype. Never used, don’t know how.”

  “Who would know?”

  “Man who built.”

  I sighed in exasperation. “Well, who else, since the man who built it isn’t here?”

  Tokughavita looked puzzled. “Is here. Is Abumaha Blinky. Didn’t know?”

  Arlene had been half listening, bored as the rest of us, but she jumped into the conversation with both feet. “Abumaha built the thing? Our Abumaha?”

  “Our Abumaha, Sanders-san.” Tokughavita slicked back a patch of hair that insisted upon curling around forward.

  I leaned over and shook him awake, describing Ninepin, but Blinky didn’t have the faintest memory of building it! “Must jolly well have been under spell of Resuscitators, pip-pip.”

  I spread my hands helplessly. “Well, did you take any notes? Draw schematics?”

  Blinky’s face brightened. “Maybe, maybe, Jack! Kept data stack from way back, maybe used from force of habitat.” He disappeared, reappeared ten minutes later in high excitement. “Yes, yes, is on nodule, damn good lucky!” Sears and Roebuck seized the interval in between to escape with their lives.

  I gestured to the engineering lab and we sealed Blinky Abumaha inside. The other five who knew engines prepped the ship.

  Nearly a day passed, but there still was no word from Blinky. When I knocked, he muttered something incoherent and refused to come out, not even to eat. Sears and Roebuck had completely disappeared into the bowels of the ship—God only knows how they even fit through the passageways!—but they must have found a cabin far away, because we didn’t see them again for the rest of the trip.

  The ship was fully set, waiting for the command, when finally the scuzz emerged, rank and disheveled, and rolling out behind him was . . .

  “Ninepin!” Arlene and I shouted simultaneously.

  The little bowling ball was crystal-translucent this time, not green at all. It said nothing, merely rolled on past, right over my toe, to a console that controlled the compression field for the hydrogen—and incidentally interfaced the ship’s mil-net. Ninepin II bumped into the bottom of the console again and again until I picked it up (it allowed me to do so) and placed it directly onto one of the nodule sockets. Ninepin glowed brightly for nearly an hour.

  “He’s downloading the entire freaking ship!” Arlene whispered in awe.

  Then it stopped and announced, in a peevish, irksome voice, “Have finished inloading. Please replace on deck.”

  I picked him up and put him down, squatted over him, and started the interrogation. “Ninepin, do you know where the tunnels are to escape from this boulder?”

  “No,” he said succinctly.

  “We can’t get out?” Arlene demanded. “You mean we’re stuck here forever?”

  “Can get out, not stuck. Not tunnel, emergency escape separation.”

  I leaned over the ball. “Okay, Ninepin, listen closely. I have more seniority than anyone else in the service, so I’m in charge of PARI. I need to know how to activate the emergency escape separation. Now how do I do it?”

  Everyone—all the humans and Sears and Roebuck were still MIA—leaned close to hear the answer, but Ninepin wanted to verify my authority. “Taggart Flynn, born 132 BPGL; joined service 113 BPGL; time in grade, 263 years. Seniority confirmed. Rank: sergeant; command nonauthorized, higher ranking personnel present.”

  We all turned to Overcaptain Tokughavita, who turned red under the attention. He cleared his throat, looking at me.

  “Toku,” I said, “why don’t you give me the authority?”

  He inhaled deeply, looking from one anxious face to another. Then he seemed to deflate, nodding in acquiescence. “By powers vested in me by Commons of People’s State of Earth,” he intoned, “hereby commission Taggart Flynn Lieutenant of Citizens of State.” My mouth dropped open, but Tokughavita wasn’t finished. “Hereby . . . resign own commission and resign Party membership.” He looked defeated, but determined.

  The scream heard across the galaxy was my own. Despite it all—though I smashed the idea down a dozen times when some Fox Company chowderhead would suggest it, and ignoring my feelings in the matter—in the end, the damned Marine officer corps got its claws into me after all! My face turned purple with anger, and Arlene laughed her butt off. “So what is your first order, Lieutenant?”

  Still flushing, I barked, “Nothing to you, Edith!” This provoked a new round of laughter from Arlene, so I gravely repeated my order to Ninepin: “The emergency escape separation, activation!”

  “Separation initiated at Lieutenant Taggart’s order,” announced the damned bowling ball. I swear, when I become king, all Data Pastiches will be annihilated.

  Nothing seemed to happen. We sat around the table looking stupid u
ntil suddenly Arlene glanced out the viewport. “How cow! Fly, c’mere, you’re not going to believe this!”

  I leaned over her shoulder, stared out the porthole, and gasped. The entire moon was splitting in two! A crack formed in the wall of the great central lunar chamber our ship was trapped in. It grew wider and wider, and soon I could see stars through the crack. In the space of fifteen minutes, the two hemispheres of PARI pushed apart from each other, connected by a thousand telescoping pylons. The connecting tubes snapped off like reeds in a storm. Of course, all this destruction and horrific shifting of forces happened in utter silence, since there was no atmosphere inside the hollow sphere.

  The PARI moon base cracked in half like a planet-egg, the two pieces rushing away from each other at 107 kilometers per hour, according to the radar tracker. We waited impatiently—it would be at least two hours before they had separated far enough to risk a straight-line barrel-run with the ship, newly christened the Great Descent into Maelstrom by Blinky Abumaha . . . and the Solar Flare of Righteous Vengeance Against Enemies of People’s State by Tokughavita. I planned to let the two of them duke it out for control of the history books.

  I sat in the captain’s chair—we had one, despite the weird individualistic streak of our communist apostles, not quite as iconoclastic as the Freds—with Ninepin on my lap, stroking his smoothness as I would a puppy’s fur. He didn’t object; he didn’t take any notice until he was asked a question. I suppose I may as well have been petting a network terminal, but I had developed an affection for the talking bowling ball. Sure got me in trouble a lot, but then so did a puppy.

  “My God,” I said for about the millionth time. It was all I could think, watching the enormousness of the engineering. “I hope Sears and Roebuck know what they’re missing.”