ys to think about it.
We fell into a standardized shipboard routine:
training, mess, watchstanding, strategic mental im-
provement (we played chess and Go), and endless
worrying, discussing, theorizing, emotional reminis-
cence of all that was best on Earth before this whole,
horrible nightmare started. Once again, I took to
walking the long, wet, slimy, hot corridors ... but
this time with Arlene at my side.
     Everything we saw reminded us of the monsters the
Freds created for us; they drew heavily from their own
world. They loved dark alcoves, doors that opened
suddenly with only a hiss for a warning; I couldn't
count how many times I whirled around, drawing
down on a frigging door!
     Horrible bas-relief faces adorned every flat surface.
Then, right in the middle of a passageway on a space
ship, for Pete's sake, we'd run into a fountain of some
dark red fluid that sure as hell looked like blood.
The walls never seemed quite straight. Maybe
straight lines and right-angle turns bothered the Freds
as much as the crazy geometry set my neck hairs
upright. "Take a look," Arlene said, pointing at a door
through which we had to pass.
     I sucked in a breath. "The mouth of Moloch? Jesus,
Albert should be here."
     I looked sharply over at her, but she wasn't torqued
by the reference to her once and only. She nodded
slowly. "Albert would have loved this spread." That
was Arlene Sanders: her response to grief and fear was
literary irony. A perfect Marine.
     Jesus, I felt homesick. Just a few months ago--my
time--I was wasting my life at Camp Pendleton,
loafing and pulling the occasional watch, thinking of
not reupping and dropping back into the world in-
stead. I had a fiancÊe, now deceased; I had parents
and high-school friends; I had the expectation that the
world would look pretty much the same twenty years
later. Then we got sent to Kefiristan, but even that
was all right; it was crap, but it was the crap I'd always
known was possible in my chosen profession.
     But when they yanked us out of the Pearl Triangle
and boosted Fox Company up to Phobos . . . well,
they yanked me out of my comfortable reality and
threw me into primordial chaos. So now I was jogging
the length and circumference of an alien spaceship,
hurling toward an unknown star at nearly lightspeed,
with a plural alien as ally and a mutable thing for a
guide; the only constancy was Arlene Sanders, now
my last and only friend.
     It's not just a job, man, it's an adventure.
The weeks crawled past like worms on a wet side-
walk. Every few days, the Newbie mutated, evolved,
whatever you call it, slowly transforming from the
roughly humanoid shape we first found into a truly
alien form with a distended stomach, a pushed-in jaw,
and longer arms. I found the change fascinating and a
little scary; who was to say it wouldn't evolve into
something we couldn't handle?
     But a queer thing happened: the closer we got to the
planetary system, which we nicknamed Skinwalker
because it was where we would find the shape-shifters,
the more frightened the Newbie became. He was
scared, terrified!
     I asked what he was so frightened of, and he
answered, "We are subject to different stimulae; we
are frightened of how we have grown to adapt to the
native circumstances."
     "You're scared you're no longer the same species!" I
accused. The Newbie said nothing, going limp
again--its usual response to information it could not
handle. Of course it couldn't. ... I had just suggested
that unity was bifurcated, that what had been one was
now two! The Newbie had no words inside its head to
explain that concept: it conceived of itself as every-
thing and nothing ... all of the Newbie species at
once and nothing of itself. How can you divide
"everything" into two piles, one of which is still
labeled "everything"?
     The Newbie was starting to realize that whatever
was waiting for us on Skinwalker was not the Newbie
race--not anymore. It was terrified of what its own
people had become, just as Arlene and I were terrified
of what Earth would look like when we finally re-
turned.
     We hawk-watched the Newbie for the first couple of
weeks, but it never did anything but sit on the table,
unmoving, and answer questions we asked it. It never
initiated conversations or tried to move. We sur-
veilled it, watching through an air-circulation grate to
see what it did when it thought no one was around;
either it didn't do anything or else it knew somehow
that we were there. Sears and Roebuck told me that
there was a hidden video system aboard the ship, used
by the captain to spy on the rest of his crew, but we
couldn't find it, and we had thrown most of the Freds
overboard on Fredworld, so we couldn't revive the
captain to tell us himself . . . even if that idea weren't
so utterly stupid that I wouldn't even mention it to
my lance.
     Gradually, we came to accept the immobile, silent
alien in the sickbay, then we started even to forget he
was there at all. I found myself and Arlene casually
talking in front of him about stuff he really wasn't
cleared to hear. After all, he was still the representa-
tive of the enemy, even if he and they had evolved in
separate directions for forty years, which was the
equivalent of possibly forty million dog years.
Five weeks into the eight-week voyage, Arlene ex-
perienced every Marine's worst nightmare: something
terrible happened on her watch. The first I knew
about it was three hours later, when she shook me
awake out of a fitful sleep, where I dreamed we land-
ed in a sea that turned out to be one, humongous
Newbie circling the planet, waiting to fold us gently
in arms like mountains and drag us to a watery
grave fifty fathoms down. "Get up, get up, Fly," she
said urgently. "Battle stations!" In an eyeblink, I was
out of bed, stark naked, with a .40-cal pistol in
my hands.
     "What? Where?" I demanded, looking for the ene-
my. We were alone in the room we called the barracks;
even Sears and Roebuck were missing, though they'd
been there when I went to sleep.
     "Fly, I screwed the pooch. Real bad." She looked so
pale and stricken that I almost reached out to hug her.
It wouldn't have been appreciated; there were times
she was a friend and times she was a Marine Corps
Lance Corporal.
     "What did you do, Lance?"
Her face took on the mask, what we wear when we
have to go report a dereliction of duty (our own) to
the XO: stone cold and icy white, lips as taut as
strings stretched to their breaking point. "Sergeant, I
was on watch at 0322; I went to check on the prisoner
in sickbay, but he was gone."
     It took a moment for the intel to sink in. "Gone?
What the hell do you mean? Where did he go?" I
glanced at my watch, the only thing I wore: 0745. The
Newbie had been missing for at least four hours and
twenty minutes.
     "I can't find him, Sarge. I've looked . . . Sears and
Roebuck and I have crawled this entire freaking ship
up one side and down the other, and we can't find a
shred of evidence that he was ever here!"
     "Where are the Klave?"
"They're still looking, but I think if we were going
to find the Newbie, we'd have found traces at least by
now." She lowered her voice and looked truly
ashamed; it was the first time I had ever seen her like
that, and I didn't like it. "I think he's, ah, been
planning this break for a long, long time--weeks,
probably."
     I pulled on my cammies, T-shirt, and jacket while
she talked. "God, Arlene, you're asking me to believe
that the Newbie sat utterly still without moving for
five weeks, just to lull us into a false sense of security!
Christ, do you realize how ridiculous that sounds?"
"It's what he did, Fly. I just know it."
     We conducted a rigorous search, but, of course, if
the person being sought doesn't want to be found, it's
not difficult to avoid four people--well, three actu-
ally, since Sears and Roebuck are inseparable by
nature--on a ship with fifty square kilometers of
deckspace. We finally gave in to exhaustion at 1310
after more than five hours of continuous searching.
The son of a bitch didn't want to be found, and by
God we weren't going to find him.
     If he was even still a him, or a Newbie, for that
matter, what weird mutation had he undergone this
time? I shuddered at the horrific, Hieronymus Bosch
images conjured up by my mind.
     Then abruptly the ship's "gravity," the acceleration
toward the outside hull, shifted radically. Suddenly,
down was not just out but forward as well. Only one
event could have caused that effect . . . and it meant
we had found our elusive gremlin, sort of: "Criminen-
talies, he's made his way to another set of nav
controls!" I shouted in Arlene's ear; he was slowing us
down or turning us, driving us away from Skinwalker
and sabotaging the mission!
     This Newbie had evolved an independent
personality . . . and he was determined not to risk
contact with the tribe, no matter what the cost to the
rest of the galaxy.



     6

     "Christ, S and R--do something!" Having
issued my first military command in a week, I did
what any good military man does when confronted
with an invisible enemy: I ran in circles, screaming
and shouting. Sears and Roebuck looked frustrated,
being constitutionally unable to follow the order "do
something."
     Then Arlene, whirling rapidly in every direction
with her magazine-fed shotgun, thought of the obvi-
ous: "Fly! Isn't this stupid Fred ship steered by
consensus?"
     "Yes! I don't know what that means!"
"Maybe S and R should hump over to another nav
center and issue another vote for our course!"
Sears and Roebuck started to run, but I grabbed
one of their arms. "Wait--before you go, set up a
computer loop that continually issues the command
to get us back on course . . . run from nav to nav,
setting up the same order wherever you can. Go!"
I gestured Arlene to me. "Okay, Lance, you and I
are going hunting." She licked her lips; sometimes
that girl is just a little too Marine.
     The gravity stopped, then reversed; we had out-
voted the Newbie. But while we broke out into one of
the outer corridors and ran the length of the ship, the
situation reversed, and again we started slowing. The
damned Newbie was doing the same thing we were!
"Arlene--how many navigational centers?"
     "Um . . . forty-one that I counted."
"Corporal, that thing has evolved intelligence be-
yond ours. We can't outthink him, so there's only one
thing to do: we have to drag him down to our level by
attacking without thought or planning, purely chance
encounters and brute force."
     We bolted through corridors lit only by our own
flashes, dashing from nav to nav at random--random
as a human brain can do--desperately hoping to
catch the Newbie as he visited nav after nav. We ran
into Sears and Roebuck--twice! But the Newbie
remained as elusive as ever.
     The third time we bumped into the Klave and
nearly blew them away, I had had enough. "Screw it,
A.S.--just start pounding a shell into each nav center
as we find it."
     It was time to reduce the choices. We went method-
ically from center to center, and in every room,
Arlene raised her semi-auto shotgun and pumped
three or four shells into the delicate programming
equipment. Everywhere we went, we tripped over
dead Freds that we didn't even remember killing (and
hadn't got around to dumping), so intense had been
that firefight when we took over the ship.
     We had destroyed more than half the navs and had
been hurled to the ground a dozen times by radical
acceleration changes when we finally kicked a door
and saw our enemy. The Newbie had his head buried
in the guts of one of the destroyed navs, trying to
repair it enough to cast another vote for slow-down.
He jerked his new triple-heads up as we entered; his
tentacle-arm snaked down the circuitry, bypassing the
damage.
     "There is no need for violence," one of the heads
said, speaking in calm, measured tones. "We must
join forces against the Freds. The Newbies have
decided they cannot coexist with the Deconstruction-
ists. If you continue on the present course, we will be
wiped out by the Newbies, who have their own
agenda. Please, just listen to us!"
     He started to make a whole lot of sense. Arlene
lowered her shotgun hesitantly, waiting to hear him
out.
     So I shot the frigging bastard before he could utter
another syllable. I raised my M-14 and squeezed off a
burst of four, the big rifle kicking against my shoulder
like a Missouri mule, disemboweling the Newbie
where he stood. Arlene stared. "Jesus, Fly" was all she
said, her voice tentative and questioning.
     The Newbie staggered back against a hydraulic
pump--God only knows what use the Freds had for
hydraulics in a spaceship--but it didn't clutch its
belly or moan or gasp "ya got me!" or anything. It
bled, the blood being pinkish white, like pale Pepto-
Bismol.
     A bulge started in his side. I understood
immediately--it was evolving more organs to relink
around the damage! I blasted them, too, and at last
the damned thing truly died ... as nearly dead as the
living dead ever could be. It bubbled softly, leaning
back against a bulkhead, then nothing.
     Yeah, but I'd seen that act before. I unloaded the
rest of the magazine into him, hitting every major
biological system I could imagine. I guess maybe I
went a little overkill; but, criminey, what else could I
do?
     "A.S.," I explained guiltily, "he was getting under
our skin. I had to do it! If I'd have let him speak,
Lance, he would have had us eating his solid waste in
five minutes flat."
     "I ... understand, but--Jesus, Fly!"
The Newbie slid slowly to the ground, staring at me
with such intensity I almost reloaded and shot anoth-
er burst into its face, just to shut those eyes! I didn't.
But for the first time, I really understood the protago-
nist of Poe's "The Telltale Heart." He turned his head
to the side, staring down at the deck. I think he was
already "dead," unable to control his neck and eye
muscles, but I still know he saw what he saw. They all
did.
     "Jesus was a man of action, Corporal." I was
getting a bit offended at her taking of the Lord's name
in vain. Maybe I was just a bit worried that Jesus
might not have liked what I had just done. "I had no
choice ... his tongue was silver!"
     She just stared, shaking her head. The ship contin-
ued to accelerate back to cruising speed, giving us two
"down" directions: outboard and aft. I felt sick, but I
didn't know whether it was from the weird "gravity"
or being sick at heart about what I had just done--
blown away the only representative we had met from
an entirely new alien species.
     We found Sears and Roebuck and told them they
could stop programming navigational centers. We
were alone. The Newbie's ghost could join that of
Rumplestiltskin and every other dead Fred on board.
We picked up the creature's body, bearing him aft to
the "bridge," just about midway along the ship's
body; actually, this bridge was just one among many.
We set him up in the co-pilot's chair, where the Fred
captain had been slain. Enemies in battle, they could
become fast allies guiding the ship of death with
spectral hands. The Newbie weighed more than I
would have expected, about twice what Arlene
weighed. I wished the nav cabins were closer to the
central core of the ship, so we wouldn't have to lug the
dead thing through nearly a full g of acceleration. This
marked the second time in living memory when Fly
Taggart ever wished for zero-g!
     We ramped up to speed again, but the monkeying
around had cost us ten days of travel and a dreadful
amount of fuel. I didn't understand how two hours of
space-jockeying could cost us ten days until Arlene
explained the fuel problem. The fuel was calculated
on two assisted accelerations: ramping up at the
beginning of the journey, after being launched by the
pinwheel launcher from Fredworld, and slowing
down at the end all by our lonesome.
     I mostly nodded and said "uh-huh" whenever she
paused to wait for my response. I was really only
interested in one aspect, which she finally disgorged.
The ramscoop only worked at a certain speed, and
you had to accelerate to that speed by other means
. . . hence, the hydrogen and liquid oxygen fuel we
carried. The hydrogen was no problem; the ship
replenished the store as a byproduct of fusion--I
guess not all the hydrogen fused, or something. But
the LOX, as Arlene called it, was irreplaceable--once
it was gone, it was gone.
     The bastard Newbie had used a lot of it trying to
slow us down. We didn't have enough left to do a
hundred-g burn for three days and match orbits with
Skinwalker. We would have to start slowing a subjec-
tive week earlier by shutting down the ramjet fusion
entirely and just letting the friction of interstellar
hydrogen against the ramscoop slow us some. Then
we would manually burn at lower thrust, conserving
our fuel and hopefully matching velocities.... If not,
we either would stop short, dead in space, drifting at
whatever velocity relative to the planet we finally ran
out of fuel, sailing on past the planet and waving bye-
bye in the rear windshield--or else we might plow
into the hunk of rock at a couple of hundred kilome-
ters per second, punching out a crater the size of the
Gulf of Mexico and, incidentally, atomizing us and
the ship.
     It all depended on Sears and Roebuck. Arlene and I
offered to help--we told them about our brilliant
piloting of the makeshift mail-rocket coming down
from the relocated Deimos moon to Earth's surface--
but the Klave just looked at each other, each putting
his gorilla-size hand on the other's head, and pumped
their crania up and down. We took it to be laughter
that time--derisive laughter.
     I had no idea how good a pilot Sears and Roebuck
were, but I had a bad feeling it was like the President
taking the stick of Air Force One when the pilot has a
heart attack. Better than giving it to the presidential
janitor, though, which was basically where Arlene and
I stood in the pecking order. God, how I wished we
hadn't left Commander Taylor back at the Hyperreal-
ist military base! That babe could fly anything.
The other big problem was that unlike back at
Fredworld, we had no friendly pinwheel launcher to
catch us here and lower us more or less gently to the
surface. We were entirely on our own.
     The rest of the journey was uneventful, including
the extra ten days of grace. We trained and practiced
various emergency drills, just for something to do:
one of the biggest problems with spaceflight is the
incredible, relentless boredom, but if there's one thing
the Marine Corps teaches you to handle, it's ennui.
We were always sitting on our hands, waiting for
somebody further up the food chain to finish a
mysterious errand, while the rest of us jarheads, men
with stripes on our sleeves, waited for The Word.
It wasn't like they let any grass grow under our feet.
There's always something to do around a military
base, even if it's just putting a nice polish on the brass
cannon on the stone steps at Pensacola (or scrubbing
the base CO's hardwood office floor with tooth-
brushes). If you manage to "miss" your gunny or your
top, you might find yourself with a whole afternoon
free, but there was always the NCO club to soak up
any extra dollars.
     On the Fred ship, it was both more and less difficult
to find something to do for weeks and weeks--harder
because there weren't any butterbars, silverbells, or
railroad tracks to tell us what to do, but easier because
we were on an alien space ship full of strange and
wonderful things to poke and monkey with, three
main corridors of 3.7 kilometers each at 0.8 g and one
at zero-g.
     I actually learned to tolerate zero-g for several
hours at a time with only a slight floaty feeling in my
stomach. Arlene loved it, naturally. The central shaft
that I called the zero-g corridor was dodecahedral,
according to A.S.--it had twelve sides. But the cor-
ners weren't sharp, they were rounded off, and the
sides were not very symmetrical in any case. Like
everything else in Fredland, the entire corridor disori-
ented me, like looking at one of those paintings by
Picasso where the eyes are head-on, but the nose is in
profile. There was a totally cool red pulse that traveled
the length of the shaft--from back to front, oddly
enough--that reminded me so much of an old sci-fi
flick that we dubbed it the Warp Coil Pulse. The walls
must have been light panels or LEDs or something; I
don't know where the illumination came from . . .
there was no source that we ever found.
     We invented a few reindeer games to play when we
got tired of training, marching, and drilling. (I made
sure Arlene and I kept up on our parade and close-
order drill; we may have been lost in space, but we
were still the United States Freaking Marine Corps,
Goddamn it!) One Arlene got from an old sci-fi book
by Heinlein: you start at one end of the corridor and
"dive" toward the other end, doing flips or spins or
butterflies or some other gymnastic feat, seeing how
far you can get and how many maneuvers you can
perform before you crash against the side. She never
did get all the way, but after the first couple of weeks, I
always did, much to Arlene's annoyance.
     I thought Sears and Roebuck would be too staid
and respectable to join in any reindeer games. Hah!
They were always the first to get tired of the milspec
crap and demand we go play. I guess decadence is
more than anything else the need to play games to
drive away the boredom demon.
     Having demonstrated their insanity by volunteer-
ing to go on our expedition, far from any possibility of
resurrection if they should "die," Sears and Roebuck
proved their fearlessness in the risks they would take
just for a thrill. Once, they put on space suits from
their fanny packs, climbed outside the ship, and
played like monkeys on the outer skin! They dangled
from the spinning hull, swinging from handhold to
handhold with their feet dangling over an infinite
abyss--one slip, and we would have lost one, if not
both, of our pilots. Probably if one had gone, the
other would have been unable to contemplate living
and would have followed the first loyally to a horrible
doom.
     But all good things must end. The time rolled by at
last, and Sears and Roebuck suddenly turned deadly
serious. We shut down the ramscoop, and I felt a
slight gravity push for'ard as we plowed into inter-
stellar hydrogen-dust and slowed. We did this for
about a week, then Sears and Roebuck started the
thrusters at a lower and more efficient level of acceler-
ation than what our ship originally had planned. It
made no difference to us; it was still far beyond the
fatal crushing level, so the inertial dampers kept it
down to the same level we had felt ramping up. Our
reindeer games stopped; we had no more zero-g shaft.
Suddenly heavy again after weeks of acceleration
ranging from 0.8 g down to zero, I dragged every
footstep, and my legs and back ached. Arlene didn't
have it so bad, since she didn't mass as much as I; she
still had a spring in her step and an increasingly grim
smile on her face. I knew the feeling; it had been
months since I killed anything. After what the Freds
had done to my life and my world, I developed the
taste for blood. Now that the Newbies had deprived
me of my rightful revenge, I was prepared to transfer
all that wrath to the new threat.
     In short, I wanted to pump a few rounds into a nice,
smooth Newbie chest. But I was also starting to get
very, very nervous about what they had managed to
evolve into in the four decades they had been down
on the planet we approached--assuming they were
still there. I saw a number of possible outcomes, none
of them pleasant: the frustration of finding no one, the
humiliation of capture, the agony of us being annihi-
lated.
     Then without warning one day, the reactor braking
suddenly stopped, sending Arlene and me flying (liter-
ally, the for'ard bulkhead that had been a deck
became a wall instantaneously, dropping us to the
outer bulkhead, which now was our only "floor"!).
"We're coming in down to landing," Sears and Roe-
buck soberly informed us, then used the last of the
hydrogen peroxide retros over the space of an hour to
cut the ship's rotation, leaving us in an orbit that
would take us directly into the planet's atmosphere
... at about mach seventy (that's Earth sea-level, dry-
air mach speed of seventy, about twenty-three kilome-
ters per second).
     Trying to land at such a speed would kill us as
surely as blowing up the reactor pile. But we were
rapidly running out of options: when Sears and Roe-
buck killed the main thrusters, they did so with only a
tiny bit of LOX remaining. "How much we got left?"
Arlene asked.
     "Approximately it is left 650 seconds is," they
answered, "but only at three gravities of Fredworld
for using the maneuvers rockets."
     Arlene and I looked at each other; that was less than
eleven minutes of burn, and without even using the
huge main thrusters! Arlene tapped rapidly on her
wrist calculator, frowned, and tried the calculation
again. "S and R," she said, broadcasting through her
throat mike into the ship's radio communication
system. "I get a net drop of about mach fifty."
"That is correct in essential."
     Arlene lowered her orange brows and spoke slowly,
like a child answering what she thinks might be a trick
classroom question. "Sears and Roebuck, if we're
doing mach seventy now, and we drop by mach fifty,
doesn't that mean we're still doing mach twenty?"
"Yes. The math are simplicity."
     Now we both looked back and forth in confusion. I
took over the interrogation, now that I understood the
situation: "S and R, you braindead morons, we'll still
be splattered across the deck like a boxload of metal-
lic atoms!"
     Long pause. Maybe they were manipulating each
other's head in that faintly obscene form of laughter
the Klave use. "No my childrens, but for we shall use
air-braking to reduceify the rest of the speed."
A terrible pit opened in my stomach. Even I knew
that the Fred ship was not, repeat not, designed to be
abused in such a fashion. It was designed to dock with
a pinwheel launcher and even to land gently using the
main thrusters to slow all the way to next to nothing
. . . not to belly-flop into the atmosphere like a disori-
ented diver, burning off excess speed by turning its
huge surface area directly into the onrushing air!
We would burn to a crisp. That is, if the ship didn't
tear itself into constituent parts first. "Hang on to
yourselves and things," suggested our mondo-weird,
binary pilots. "We're burning away the fuel starting
now."



     7

     The ship jerked, shimmied like a garden
hose, jerked again. "Where the hell's that crazy
mofo?" I demanded.
     Arlene was knocked away from her perch by anoth-
er sudden "earthquake." I caught her by the arm, so
she didn't carom across the zero-g ship. "Christ! I
think he said he was headed toward Nav Room One,
right inside the engine compartment!" The ship
twirled like a chandelier, or so it felt; we dangled from
handholds, feeling sudden acceleration trying to yank
us free to fling us into God knows where. Nearly
eleven minutes later, the acceleration vanished as
abruptly as it began. Sears and Roebuck finished the
final burn. We were dead-sticking it the rest of the way
in, and that would be the end of the Fred ship--and
possibly of us, too.
     Then the atmosphere thickened enough that we
started feeling a real push; the bow of the ship became
"down," the stern "up." I drifted against the for'ard
bulkhead, now floor, with about 0.2 g, which quickly
escalated to full, then more than full gravity. Two,
three times our normal g! The inertial dampers were
offline, probably out of juice; we suffered through the
full deceleration phase. Four g's, four and a half.
The air-braking went on forever. I was crushed to
the deck by about eight hundred pounds of weight!
Then the gravity began to slide along the deck toward
the ventral bulkhead. Sears and Roebuck were pitch-
ing the nose upward to expose more of the hull to the
atmosphere.
     We shed airspeed even as we gained more weight. I
heard a horrific explosion astern of us--the ship
swerved violently, hurling us across the new floor!
Arlene fell against me, but I was stunned. I shook my
head. "What the freaking hell--!"
     She stared out a porthole, face ashen. "Jesus, Fly!
Freakin' ship splitting!" She slid her hand along the
deck and pointed. I just barely saw a huge piece of the
Fred ship below us, tumbling end over end, shattering
into "tiny" splinters scores of meters long.
It was getting hard to talk. We needed all our breath
to bear down, forcing blood back into our heads.
Thank God we were lying down--at now six g's,
sitting up we might have passed out. I knew what was
happening: the Fred ship, strong as it was, was never
intended to burn through the atmosphere like this! It
was fracturing along heat seams, separating into the
components that had been attached by the Freds
when they assembled the vehicle, probably in orbit.
The damned thing was way too long for this sort of
monkey crap.
     "Forward!" I shouted, nearly blacking out with the
effort. Arlene stared, confused--lack of oxygen-
bearing blood in her brain, maybe--so I repeated,
"Forward! Nav Room One!"
     If any component of the ship was to survive the
fiery reentry, it would be the biggest, strongest
section--the decks and compartments where the en-
gines actually burned, shook, and vibrated. Besides, if
that section went, we would all die anyway--no pilot!
We weren't far from it, maybe a couple of hundred
meters. But it was a marathon! Arlene strained and
slithered forward, like a snake; I tried to follow suit,
but the best I could do was a humping motion that
wrenched my back something fierce. God, to be young
again, and supple. The monstrous gravity squeezed us
to the ventral deckplates like an enormous boot
stamping on our backs. Each compartment was con-
nected to the next by a flexible rubber bottleneck that
could easily be sealed to isolate a puncture. The
rubber mouths became jaws of death, smothering and
suffocating us as we wriggled through them. We could
have used some petroleum jelly; I had plenty . . .
about a kilometer behind us in my seabag.
     After the first four rooms, my muscles were so sore I
grunted with pain with every meter crawled. Arlene
was crying; I'd almost never seen her cry before, and
never from sheer physical pain. It scared me--the
world was ending!
     The groans from the ship as it tore itself apart sure
as hell sounded like the end of the world, the universe
grinding down noisily . . . long drawn-out moans, a
loud noise like the cry of a humpbacked whale,
shrieks and sobs, the wailing of the damned in hell,
gnashing their teeth. The devil himself danced around
me in hooves and pointed tail, laughing and capering,
pointing at me in my mortal distress. Or was it a hell
prince minotaur? A horrible hallucination; my Lord, I
surely did see him, in flesh of red and reeking of
sulphur and the grave. Then a steam demon and a
boney leapt through the walls! Old home week for
Fred monsters!
     But I knew where salvation lay, for'ard, for'ard to
Nav Room One. When Arlene faltered and tried to lie
down and die in front of me, I put my hand on her
flattened derriÉre and shoved with a strength I'd
never felt before. The handful of ass moved ahead,
dragging the girl along with it.
     Another four rooms, only two left. My belly and
chest were scraped raw, and my groin ached with the
agony of a well-placed jackboot. Spittle ran down my
chin, smearing on the deck and dehydrating me. We
suffered under a full eight g's then, according to my
wrist accelerometer, and even my eyeballs throbbed
with pain, horribly distended toward the deck. Color
had long since disappeared, and even the black and
white images I could still see narrowed to a tunnel of
light. Blurry outlines bent and twisted under the
force. Again, the ship skewed, spun out of control
until Sears and Roebuck regained control. How the
hell were they flying the ship? Were there even any
control surfaces left?
     We shoved through the last two rubber collars; I
almost died in the second when my bulk stuck fast,
and I couldn't breathe for the clingy seal across my
mouth and nose. Arlene saved my life then, reaching
back into the bottleneck, somehow mustering the
strength to drag me forward by my hair a meter,
clearing the rubber from my face. At last, we lay on
the floor of Nav Room One, broken and bleeding
from nose and ears, unable to see, hugging the deck
like drunks at the end of a spree.
     I heard sounds above the shredding of the ship
behind us, words--Sears and Roebuck saying some-
thing. Desperately, I focused. "Being--shot." They
gasped. "Shot at down--defenders shooting--ship
breaking into part--loosing controlling."
     Shot? Shot at? What the hell was this outrage? It
was just too much, on top of the agony of reentry, to
have to put up with this weaponry BS as well! "Kill--
bastards," I wheezed. Ho, fat chance; more likely, we
would all die before the ship even hit the ground--
blown apart by relentless defenders with particle-
beam cannons.
     I passed out, only for a moment; I woke to hear
Sears and Roebuck repeating over and over, "Dirt
alert! Dirt alert!" I opened my eyes, focused just long
enough to see the ground rushing up like a freight
train, then went limp and dark again. I composed my
epitaph: Goodbye, cruel alien world.
     Sears and Roebuck must have flared out at the last
moment, for I felt the nose rise majestically. Then the
remaining tail section of the Fred ship, whatever was
left, struck the ground with particular savagery, and
the ship slammed belly-first into what turned out to
be silica sand. A miracle that proved my faith--had it
been granite or water, we would have been atomized.
We were still traveling at least mach four when we
painted the desert, and we plowed a twenty-seven-
kilometer furrow across the surface of the planet,
kicking up sandy rooster tails taller than the Buchan-
an Building in the forty seconds it took us to slide to a
stop.
     When the landing was over, we lay on the deck
panting and gasping. Sears and Roebuck were out;
they were used to a lot heavier gravitation than we,
but that shock was a bit much even for them, being
seated in the pilot's chair. The ship's safety proce-
dures performed as advertised, shedding pieces of
ship well back over the horizon to dissipate the
energy, while protecting the for'ard compartments of
the ship, where the most precious intelligent cargo
would have clustered.
     Arlene was already sitting up on her butt when I
awoke; her head was back as she tried to staunch a
pretty bad nosebleed. I tasted a lot of blood, but it was
a few seconds before I realized I had lost my left,
upper, outermost incisor. I vaguely looked for it, still
somewhat groggy, but it was nowhere to be seen. I
started to blink back to conscious awareness.
Arlene saw that I was awake. Without lowering her
head, she croaked, "I guess--that wasn't--the
world's greatest landing."
     Holding my jaw, which had started to throb, I had
time to mutter a Marine definition: "A good landing
is anything you walk away from." Then the pain really
hit me all over, and I was busy gritting my teeth and
stifling screams until Arlene kindly injected me with a
pain suppressor and stimulant from her combat ar-
mor medipouch.
     Sears and Roebuck woke up, little the worse for
wear. "Shall we to outgo and face the new brave
world?" they cheerfully asked. It was the closest I'd
ever come to fragging two of my own men.



     8

     "Livable?" asked Arlene, her voice hoarse
and painful to hear.
     Sears and Roebuck grunted. "Justice a minute,
justice a minute." They tapped at several keys on the
command console, hmming and humming as the few
sensors that had not burned off in the crash sampled
the air, the radiation levels, the temperature, and
looked for any dangerous bacteria, viruses, molds, or
other microorganisms. "Not to kill," they announced
at last.
     "Healthy?" I gasped.
"Not to kill."
     Their irritating evasiveness put me on my guard,
but what could we do? The ship's air seal was rup-
tured, and we soon would be sucking down Skin-
walker's air, whether we wanted to or not. The
machinery that manufactured the nutrition pills was
back a kilometer in the ship and was probably
smeared across the landscape. So we would soon
enough be eating local food and drinking local water,
if there was any--or dying of thirst and hunger. Our
combat suits would serve as a limited shield against
radiation, but they would only mitigate, not negate
the ill effects. For good or ill, we were cast upon the
shores of Skinwalker, offered only wayfarer's bounty.
God, how poetic. We would either be able to digest
the local produce or die trying.
     We picked ourselves up off the floor, painfully
peeling the deckplates away from our skin. Arlene
wasn't hit as hard as I--less mass per surface area.
Our armor was pounded hard, protective value proba-
bly compromised but still better than zip. Despite
their chipper words, Sears and Roebuck had a hard
time peeling themselves out of the command chair
(which had survived remarkably intact). Arlene let me
lean on her shoulders, and our pilots supported each
other, as we limped to the emergency hatch. I pulled
the activation lever. Explosive bolts blew outward,
taking the hatch cover with them.
     Shaking, we climbed down the ladder, two hundred
meters or more. It was a straight shot, not staggered
the way human ladders generally are: if one of us were
to slip.... I nervously watched Sears and Roebuck
above me, but I shouldn't have worried; their legs may
have been ridiculously short, but they were
     powerful--all due to the high gravity of the Klave
homeworld. Arlene and I were more likely to slip and
fall in the relatively modest gravity of the planet,
about 0.7 g.
     The world looked like the Mojave Desert, or maybe
we just happened to land in a desert area. I hadn't
gotten much of a look during the crash. I looked up.
The sky was too pale, but I saw oddly square clouds,
almost crystalline; we had weather, evidently. Bend-
ing down, grimacing, I lifted a handful of sand: the
grains were finer than Earth sand, fine enough that I
decided Arlene and I should wear our biofilters;
really, really fine silica can clog up your alveolae and
give you something like Black Lung Disease. There-
after, we spoke through throat mikes into our "loz-
enge" receivers. I don't know what Sears and Roe-
buck did when I pointed out the problem; they had
their own radio.
     The brownish gray sandscape depressed me. Under
a pale sky, the only spots of color were the green and
black of our standard-issue combat suits and Sears
and Roebuck's muted orange flightsuits, which they
had worn ever since the mission began. Everything
else was the color of dingy gray socks that hadn't been
washed in a month.
     "Okay, S and R, what the hell did you mean about
us being shot at?" My tongue couldn't help exploring
the new hole in my mouth, where the tooth had been;
the hole still throbbed, but the sharp pain was gone.
Gotta get S and R to fix this, I promised.
     "Meaned what was said; they were firing at us shots
from cannons."
     "Energy weapons, artillery shells, what?" Extract-
ing usable information from Sears and Roebuck was
worse than sitting through a briefing by Lieutenant
Weems--may he rest in peace for a good long time.
"Were firing the slugs from the electromagnabetic
accelerating gun."
     "Um, a rail gun?" asked Arlene, picking up on the
answer faster than I. Anything to do with exotic
technology or weaponry was A.S.'s subject--she
could lecture for hours on ogre tanks and orbiting
"smart spears," and she sometimes did.
     "Yes, the rail gun," confirmed Sears and Roebuck. I
sort of knew what a rail gun was: you took slugs of
depleted uranium, encased them in a ferromagnetic
shell casing, and accelerated them to several kilome-
ters per second velocity using electromagnets. The
resulting "gun" could damn near put shells into
orbit--they moved so fast, they punched through any
sort of imaginable armor like a bullet through thin
glass. It was a horrific weapon we had never been able
to make work properly. The first shot always de-
stroyed the target, but generally also our rail-gun
prototype!
     I  licked  dry  lips.   If the  enemy--Newbies  or
Freds?--could build a tactical-size version, our com-
bat armor would be utterly useless; if we ever took a
shot, we'd be toast.
     The desert was evidently deserted; but the solitude
did not begin to compare to the vast loneliness of the
starry void. I stared at the desolation, taking some
comfort in the feel of ground beneath my feet, the
breath of wind against my armor. The air smelled
tangy--ozone--but so far I was breathing all right.
"Hey S and R," I called, softly under such a sky, "is
that ozone from our ship, or is it natural to the
atmosphere?"
     "We didn't detect it orbitally," they answered in
unison. I shrugged. If any of us had asthma, it might
have been a problem. But I never had any, Arlene's
was cured by the doctors at NAMI, and Sears and
Roebuck could take care of themselves.
     "Which way toward the dinks who were shooting at
us?" Arlene asked. Sears and Roebuck turned slowly
through the entire 360-degree panorama, then
pointed basically along the twenty-seven kilometer
trench our ship had dug. Arlene turned to me, raising
her brows like a pair of question marks.
     Toward or away from danger? Didn't seem to be
much of a choice. S and R had detected no signs of
civilization on the planet--no powerlines, power-
plants, canals, or structures larger than two or three
stories. If there was anything smaller, it wouldn't have
shown up on their quick microwave scan. So far as I
could tell, the only sign of intelligent life was the gun
battery that had pounded our ship into rubble.
Oh, what the hell! "Let's at least eyeball the wogs
and see who they are. My guess is they don't belong
here any more than we do."
     The air temp on the desert Arlene dubbed the
Anvil of God was livable; Sears and Roebuck hadn't
lied. But they never claimed it was comfortable ...
and 60 degrees centigrade certainly didn't qualify.
Our helmets kept the direct sunlight off our heads,
and we had several days' worth of water if we used the
recirc option, pissing into a tube and recycling it back
to the drinking nipple. Arlene was not happy about
doing that. Being a female, this meant she had to strip
and pee into a bedpanlike device, whereas I just wore
a sheath. There were no trees, so no privacy. She
could have turned her back, but in a typical act of
defiance, A.S. just did it right in front of me and the
Klave. I pretended nonchalance, as if women urinated
in front of me all the time--Arlene had done it
before, anyway, in combat situations. But in reality I
was shocked and embarrassed every damned time ...
but I sure wasn't about to let Arlene know that! I
would never hear the end of it.
     We cut off the furrow about two klicks laterally and
paralleled it, figuring that whoever was shooting at us
would follow the skidmarks to see what he had shot
down. The armor monitored the outside air, regulat-
ing heat venting to prevent us showing a hot signature
on an infrared optical device, and we kept the mikes
cold and ultrashort range--outside of five to seven
meters, the fuzzy signal attenuated into the back-
ground noise. We had a reasonably good chance of not
getting caught, and, damn it, I wanted to see those
bastards with their itchy trigger fingers, see them up
close and personal!
     We had passed directly over the battery about fifty
klicks back; the journey would take us at least two
days and some . . . but after only ten kilometers, we
ran into a scouting party from the wogs driving some
kind of land cart. Not literally ran into--we picked
them up when they were still five klicks range, track-
ing directly along our ship's wake.
     Trusting to our electronic countermeasures, we
loped toward them until we were within half a klick;
at that point, we dropped to our bellies and crawled
the remaining distance, while the bad guys broke for
lunch. Arlene and I were both hungry, but we were
rationing our Fred food . . . and especially our Fred-
pills.
     We got within a hundred meters, easily within
range of my M-14 BAR and the lever-action .45-
caliber rifle that Arlene toted for those occasions
where a shotgun just wouldn't do. We watched them
through our scopes, trying to figure out who they
were.
     They looked oddly human, but their heads and
bodies were covered by thick pressure suits that might
have had battlefield capability. Their proportions
were humanoid. There were four scouts and one
supervisory type with a notepad built into his wrist
armor; I can smell an officious, jerky sergeant a klick
off.
     "Sarge," Arlene said faintly over the radio, "there's
no cover, and we can pop most of them before they
burrow into the sand. We can take them before they
know what hit; they might not even get off a mes-
sage."
     I hesitated--not a good move for a battlefield non-
com, but sometimes you really don't have enough
intel. "Hold your fire, A.S. Let's see if we can hear
them first."
     I programmed my electronic ears to scan sequen-
tially all sixty-four million channels, looking for any-
thing non-random; I caught a few tiny bursts of
information, but nothing that lasted longer than 0.02
seconds, according to the log. "You pick up any-
thing?" I asked.
     "Fly, I'm getting bursts of pattern from channel 23-
118-190 that last about 0.02; they all last just that
long. You seeing that?"
     "Now that you mention it--"
"I think whoever they are, they use much narrower
frequency channels than we use; we're kind of scan-
ning past them by scanning up and down within the
channel. Let me small this thing down and just scan
up and down at that freq. Stand by."
     I would have done the same thing, except I hadn't
exactly paid attention during my techie classes in
radio-com. I waited, fuming, while Arlene made the
necessary software adjustments. I kept the aliens in
my scope, following their progress up the "road"
formed by our long skid to rest. Finally, she finished
tapping at her wrist and came back to me. "Here, plug
into me." I fitted my female connector over her wrist
prongs. A couple of seconds later, I started hearing
what obviously were words in recognizable sentences.
There was something damnably familiar about the
rhythms and pauses in the speech; I was sure I had
heard it before. Even the words sounded tantalizingly
close to something I could understand--a little clear-
er than Dutch, I reckoned. If I strained, I could almost
make out what they were saying.
     I realized with a chill that there was no almost
about it: I did understand them--they were speaking
English! But it was a harsher, colder kind of English,
peppered with utilitarian gruntlike words I had never
heard. I could even tell who was speaking by the odd
mannerisms they used when they made a point. Now
that I knew they were human, I could even see their
body-language expressions, though they held them-
selves with a studied limpness that irritated me. With
omissions, I heard an exchange between the sergeant
and one of the scouts.
     "Are [new word] [new word]-destroyed ship?"
"Carried it [new word], sub-sir. Saw it [new word]."
"Was Fred; pattern-match was [new word], old ship
from [new word]. Should have [new word]-shot back.
Don't like this; something [new word]."
     "[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 hu-
mans 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 fol-
low 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 real-
ized 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 infor-
mation. 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, Sand-
ers," 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 suspi-
cious 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. "Con-
quered Earth--killed--left--followed here."
     Arlene and I looked up at each other, and I swal-
lowed 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 sud-
denly 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. Even-
tually 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; other-
wise, I ignored it as their unique craziness. Maybe it
was ordinary among Klave; maybe they were consid-
ered 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 sud-
denly 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 another, 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 shoul-
der. 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 per-
verse? 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 out-
side. . . . 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 Chan-
nel. 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 centu-
ries 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 emotion-
ally 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, read-
ing 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.
     "It's all right," I said carefully. "I understand why
you shot. I won't mention it again." The overcaptain
smiled. The interview was proceeding nicely, but only
because I let it.
     The overcaptain stared at me for a long time, so
long that I started to fidget. I didn't know what he
wanted. At last, he cleared his throat and spoke again:
"Were in imminent fear of death?"
     "Huh?"
"You were afraid you were going to die when we
were shooting?"
     Couldn't he leave ill enough alone? "Um, yes, sir.
We figured we were going to buy it."
     He started to break down. He mumbled and looked
at his notes, then cleared his throat again and flushed
red. "Why did you stand-fight? How could you?"
"How could I? What else would you expect a
     Marine to do, sir? If I were going down, I wanted to
take a few of the bastards with me ... um, no offense,
sir."
     The overcaptain grunted and scribbled in his gouge
book. But after years in the field under fire, I can
always tell when someone is scared--and Overcap-
tain Tokughavita was hiding terror behind that mask
of objectivity. Terror about what?
     I glanced to my right and saw that Arlene was
awake, lying on her own side and following the
exchange. It emboldened me, her being there. "Sir,
can you tell me why Josepaze just fell apart when we
captured him? He sounded like he thought dying was
the worst possible thing he could think of--as a
soldier, don't you accept death as a possibility?"
Bad mistake. I had to listen to a twenty-minute
lecture on what I already knew, that Homo sap was
the only race in the galaxy anyone had discovered
who could actually die. But the more we talked about
death and dying, the more agitated he became until
his skin was pale, he was sweating, and his eyes darted
left and right instead of fixing on me, as they had at
the beginning of the interview.
     I suddenly realized the blindingly obvious: Over-
captain Tokughavita suffered from necrophobia, the
irrational fear of death. He was asking how Arlene
and I had managed not to panic under fire!
     I began to get very uneasy, squirming around on my
table. How could a soldier with a morbid fear of dying
rise to such a high rank? He asked a couple of "wind-
down" questions designed to relax me: what battles I
had fought in and something about types of food.
That last reminded me of the pills we needed to
survive on somebody else's; but I figured that since
they were human like us, we could probably eat their
food directly. Then he left me alone to wonder how
humans just like me (the overcaptain and my erst-
while prisoner) so obviously could have no courage at
all when it came to risking their lives.
     Arlene sat up on her table, grimacing and involun-
tarily clutching her stomach. "Christ!" she said. "Are
we the only humans left who still believe in honor and
duty even unto death, semper fi, and all that?"
I shook my head, lying back against the hard cold
cushion. "We've only had two examples! I'll bet seven
to two that we'll eventually find that Tokughavita is
pretty unrepresentative of the soldiers even in his
era."
     Well, Arlene should have taken those odds. Over
the next four days, while my arm was still immobi-
lized and Arlene slowly healed up, seven more sol-
diers wandered in to talk to me about death and
ended up shaking like a leaf in a lawn blower. By the
time I was ready for transport, and my broken clavicle
and arm joint were nearly mended, I had figured out
that this entire band of humans were so paranoid with
necrophobia that they fell all to pieces at even the
thought of death.
     On the fifth day, I was up and about. They didn't
rub my face into it during that convalescence that I
was a prisoner. I had the run of their ship parked in
the sand, except for certain restricted areas around
the engines and computer stacks.
     I didn't realize my life was about to take a hellish
turn: Arlene and I were both summoned to separate
but adjoining cabins in the stern of the human ship.
Somebody had suddenly decided that he simply
couldn't live without knowing all about our ability to
transcend the fear of death and dying. He decided to
give us a little test.



     10

     The human ship looked roughly like the Fred
ship, except scaled down by a factor of four or five.
They walked me up a bunch of spiral stairwells and
into a small cabin, and suddenly the best-buds routine
ended. Before I could struggle or fight back, three guys
grabbed me and forced me into a chair, then cuffed
both ankles and my left wrist with plastic straps
embedded in the seat. A wall suddenly paled and
turned transparent, and I saw into the adjacent room
where they'd taken Arlene: she was trussed up just as I
was, two Christmas turkeys staring at each other
through a bulkhead that had suddenly turned into a
window.
     A large clock--the old-fashioned analog kind--
faced me below the window. It was marked up to sixty
by fives, and a needle was set at the far end of the
scale. Next to the clock was a tube that looked
disturbingly like the business end of a large-bore rifle,
something ghastly like .75-caliber. I did not like the
looks.
     The overcaptain stood where I could see him.
"Have sixty seconds before gun fires. Whoever moves
lever first will live, other will die. If no one moves
lever before time limit, both die."
     Through the window, I saw another man talking to
Arlene. From the way she paled, I figured she had
received the same instructions.
     "Starts now," declared that malevolent thug Tokug-
havita, pressing a button on top of the clock. The
hand began to sweep downward, and I felt every
oriface contract and clench. My mouth was dry; even
my tongue was sandpaper when I tried to lick my lips.
Christ . . . oh, Christ! My right hand was free, the
lever that would kill Arlene in easy reach. I made no
move toward it. Through the glass, or whatever it was,
I could see Arlene equally miserable, equally immo-
bile.
     I turned to the overcaptain, who watched with
curious dispassion. "I will kill you for this, you--as
God and Jesus are my witnesses, you will never live
another day without looking over your shoulder for
me."
     "Have thirty-five seconds," he declared, starting to
look pale. "Must push lever to live. Can't kill me if
you're dead."
     My eyes bored into his skull so hard he flinched and
looked away. "My soul will return as a ghost and
hound you into your grave," I promised, my voice so
low he could barely hear it. He began to shake and sat
down abruptly on a chair, staring at my right hand. I
deliberately clenched it into a fist and left it just
barely touching the lever . . . but not moving it.
"Watch how a man dies," I promised, "for the Corps;
in God we trust."
     "What is this God?"
I curled my lip. "If you don't know, I don't think I
can tell you in twenty seconds."
     "What is God?" he demanded, practically
screaming.
     "God is faith. Without faith, man is a beast." I
looked at the clock--ten seconds of life remained.
"So long, beast."
     "Other will kill you!"
"No, she won't."
     "How do you know? Must push lever, save your-
self!"
     "I don't know, I have faith. Oh, sir?"
"What? What?"
     "Screw you, sir. You're a walking dead man."
The second hand swept through the last few sec-
onds into the red. I closed my eyes and clenched my
teeth, preparing for the blow that would open a hole
in my chest the size of the great Martian rift. But
instead of the explosion, I heard a loud snap. When I
blinked my eyes open, I saw Overcaptain Tokug-
havita, face wild and eyes staring, his hand still
clutching the button at the top of the clock. He has no
will, I realized. I've beaten the bastard!
     I deliberately slowed my breathing, trying to calm
my pounding heart. Arlene's face was florid, the
normally pale skin flushing deep pink, but her expres-
sion made me shudder: I had never seen my bud with
such cold buried rage. The overcaptain unlocked me
as the other man on the other side unlocked Arlene. I
made no mention of my decision--I never go back on
my word, and I had sworn to kill him, but that didn't
mean I had to remind my target in case he had
forgotten or not believed me.
     I noticed one strange thing. Back in the Corps, an
officer might be in charge of an op and do most of the
planning, but he would have a batch of enlisted men
do the actual physical grunt-work (which is why they
call us grunts). But here, aside from the initial strap-
down, which required several helpers for a man my
size, Overcaptain Tokughavita had done everything
himself, despite the fact that there were numerous
people around obviously of lower rank. Jesus, didn't
they even have the concept of a chain of command
anymore?
     I rose, matching Arlene. Both of us marched from
our staterooms, angry and hot, and rejoined each
other in the passageway. We said not a word all the
way back to our quarters, then Arlene did something
she only rarely does: she wrapped both arms around
me and held tight for several minutes, reassuring
herself that I was still there. I stroked the shaved back
of her head--after all these years, Lance Corporal
Arlene Sanders had maintained that same high-and-
tight she had worn the first day I saw her, when she
and Gunnery Sergeant Goforth played William Tell.
When she was certain I wasn't going anywhere, she
unburied her face and grabbed my uniform by the
lapels. "Fly," she said, "these people are nearly
starved to death for faith."
     "You're an atheist," I pointed out.
"It doesn't have to be faith in God! Just anything
outside and higher than themselves, like the Corps, or
honor, anything. They've got the words; they talk
about 'the commons' as if that meant something to
them. But it's just words; they don't really act like it
. . . they act like totally individualist pigs."
"Social atoms," I agreed. "The Church has always
warned about the danger of social atomism--where
you think only about yourself as an individual, not
about your community, country, society. These so-
called communists are the most socially atomist peo-
ple I've ever seen! I see what you mean. They don't
believe in anything, really."
     "Fly, there's something weird going on here with
these people. I have a terrible feeling we're missing
something big ... or something really, really small.
But if we can get ahold of the faith lever ..."
"Women's intuition?"
     Arlene rolled her eyes. "All right, sure, call it that. It
doesn't change the fact that there's something hidden
here, and, by God, we're going to find it, Bud! I mean,
Sergeant. If we get ahold of the faith lever somehow, I
think we can move this mountain to Mohammed."
I blinked at the metaphor food-processor action,
but I got the general drift. This was what we call a
"high-level strategic victory condition"--a blue-sky
goal. But at least it was something to shoot at.
The holding cell was pretty civilized, as far as those
things go. We had a nice bunk, and Arlene and I
didn't mind shacking up--to sleep, that is. There was
a fold-down toilet and sink, a table, even a terminal,
except we couldn't figure out how to crack the security
system around the local net. In fact, we couldn't get
away from the initial set of menus, which seemed to
display informative "non-authorized pers" as 3-D
letters floating above the keypad whenever we got far
enough along any route.
     Our uniforms were starting to stink, but when you
live in a ditch in Kefiristan for eight months, you're
thankful for any pair of trousers or camouflage jacket
that doesn't actually get up and crawl away under its
own motive force. Arlene had more pressing needs, as
a woman, but she managed to explain enough to the
guard that he brought some cotton, which she
wrapped in a cloth torn from the tail of her shirt. God
only knew what she was going to do tomorrow.
I sat down on my bunk, flexing the arm that by all
rights should have been broken and immobilized for
months. "Hey, A.S., you notice anything remarkable
here?"
     She barely glanced up from the terminal, trying yet
again. "You mean besides our miraculous medical
cure?"
     "I meant the medical. I was pretty damned shot up;
you even ..." I paused. I had been about to tell her
that she even shot me once herself, but I decided there
was no point. Why make her feel like crap? "Even you
should have had some really bad bruises, even if your
armor took all the shots. But I know I had at least four
bullets in my arm and one in my leg, and one of the
ones in my arm took out my rotator cuff."
     I stood, moving my arm in a slow, but steady,
circular arc. "So how come I can do this?" I winced,
but the point was I could do it at all!
     She shrugged. "Fly, they're two hundred years
more advanced than we. Wouldn't you expect them to
be able to perform medical miracles? I'm more sur-
prised by something you haven't even noticed yet,
Sarge."
     I waited. When she didn't continue, I growled.
"Ah, look at the ship," she said hastily.
     I looked around our jail cell. "For what? Every-
thing's pretty shipshape, as what's his face, that CPO
out of Point Mugu would say."
     "Squared away? Sharp corners, nice right angles?
Everything our size? Sink and toilet perfectly fitting
us humans, and obviously integral to the ship, not an
add-on?"
     "Oh." Light began to dawn on marblehead. "You
mean this ship was built for humans?"
     "Sarge, this ship was built by humans!" She stood,
making a wide gesture that included the entire ship,
not just our little white cell. "All of it--the whole ship
was built by human beings--and I'll bet if we looked
at the engines, they would say Pratt and Whitney or
Northrop!"
     "Jesus ... so we're out in space on our own, now?
Not just piggybacking on a Klave ship or hijacking
some Freds?" I stared. Everywhere I looked, now that
I was looking for it, the decor screamed Western
European American human. Even the language was
basically English with a lot of slang words we didn't
know.
     All right, so the Earth had become some sort
of social-welfare semi-capitalist world-wide govern-
ment--but it was still ours. We had won the freaking
battle, oo-rah!
     "Notice something else about the ship, Sarge?"
"Look, knock it off with the Sarge stuff. I'd rather
be Fly when we're alone. Save it for the troops. What
else about the ship?"
     "Sorry, Fly. Um ... oh, that's right; you were
unconscious when they loaded us aboard. Fact is, I
thought sure you were dead. I was barely awake
myself, and after they got me here, they shot me full
of tranks and I was out until I woke up with you." She
leaned toward me, tapping her eyes. "But I wasn't
completely unconscious when they scooped us up
after the Battle of Quicksand Hill. I pretended to be,
and I got an eyeful."
     "All right, spit it out, Lance. What did you see?"
"Hmph! Now you're the one with the rank thing,
Sergeant Fly. I got a good look at the outside of the
ship. Two things: first, there are English-language
markings on it, or at least they're using our alphabet;
this thing is designated TA-303. . . . Does that mean
there are several hundred ships in the human fleet?"
I scratched my head and shrugged. "I don't know
how the Navy numbers ships, Red, if it still even is the
Navy. But you're probably right that they wouldn't be
numbering in the hundreds if there were only three or
four of them."
     "And second, Fly-dude, the thing was tiny--barely
three hundred and fifty meters long and no wider than
an aircraft carrier from our era."
     I thought about the Fred ship--3.7 kilometers long
and almost half a klick in diameter. Most of that was
engine, which meant--
     "Arlene, are you saying this ship is much more
advanced than the Fred ship?"
     "Not just in engineering tech, Fly. Did you notice
when they took us to Torture Theater, we went up a
long series of spiral ladderways?"
     "Yeah. So?"
"We went up about eight flights."
     "Yeah. So?"
"Fly, that's more than half the diameter of the
ship."
     "Yeah. So--" I froze in mid-dismissal. The signifi-
cance suddenly struck me. If you ascended past the
centerline of the Fred ship while the ship was parked
on the tarmac, suddenly all the decks would be upside
down. The Freds induced acceleration that func-
tioned like gravity by spinning the circular ship, so the
outer deck had the heaviest gravity and the inner core
was zero-g.
     But the ship was built like a building--they never
intended gravity to pull any direction but one!
"Christ, girl. We've got artificial gravity--real artifi-
cial gravity, like in 'Star Trek'!" I sat down and
thought for a moment. "Arlene, didn't Sears and
Roebuck say that the gravity zones left behind by the
First Ones, the guys who built the stuff on Phobos and
Deimos, the Gates and stuff, couldn't possibly work on
a ship--not even theoretically?"
     She nodded gravely. "Yup. Obviously, this ship is
more advanced than what the First Ones built.
"Fly, I've been trying to reconcile all of this with
the pace of human technological development. Now
maybe I'm just getting cynical in my old age; I don't
think so--I still think we can take control here and
win this thing. But criminey, Fly! Interstellar travel
and artificial gravity and extraordinary medical ad-
vances, all in a couple of hundred years--starting
from a completely destroyed civilization?"
     I stared, saying nothing. The creepiest feeling was
dawning across me.
     "Fly, does that sound reasonable to you? Even
considering that we evolve so much faster than the
Klave or the Freds?"
     I slowly shook my head. When we left Earth, we
were fighting for our lives. Humanity had been set
back at least fifty or seventy-five years--our cities
destroyed, nuked; bacteriophages sweeping the globe;
the Freds had just perfected their ultimate terror
weapon: genetically engineered monsters that looked
just like human beings, until they opened fire on you.
The aliens had the power to move entire planets
around like bowling balls! And they had what we
called the Fred ray, an immensely powerful blob of
energy that cut down everything in its path.
Arlene was right; it was pretty freaking hard to
believe that in only two centuries we'd move from
that to this. In fact . . . "Arlene, I know of only one
race that evolves that fast."
     "You and me both, Sarge. I mean, Fly."
I looked around, feeling my stomach clench.
     "These guys are Newbies? Not humans?"
She shook her head. "No. Why would the Newbies
evolve into human-looking critters? They go forward,
not back! Look, we know these guys left Earth a
hundred years ago, two centuries after we did. But we
don't know when or if they encountered the
     Newbies--or when they suddenly got this explosive
burst of technological creativity. What if--?"
"What if," I took over for her, "the Newbies ran
into humans decades ago? Look, we don't know
where the Newbie homeworld is; maybe it's closer to
Earth than the Fred base we went to first, less than
sixty light-years away. What if somehow they met us
and influenced us to evolve more at the Newbie rate
than our normal rate, fast though it was?"
     Arlene leaned close, not that it would help if there
were sensitive dish-mikes trained on us to pick up
every sound. "What if the Newbies are here after all,
here with the humans--but we just can't see them for
some reason?"
     I told her about the overcaptain reading invisible
readouts from somewhere above Arlene's prostrate
form in sickbay. "This ain't good, Lance; I don't like
the idea of invisible Newbies running around like
ghosts in the machine."
     She sat down on the hard bunk, closing her eyes to
the relentlessly white bulkheads. "I don't like any of
this, Fly. I don't like the idea that faith, not brainpow-
er, turns out to be our weapon. I'm on shakier ground
there than you or--or Albert would have been." She
put her hand to her chest; she'd twice had an engage-
ment ring from her beloved, and she wore the ring on
her dog-tag chain. Then we went through one of the
Gates built by the First Ones, and, of course, the ring
vanished with everything else.
     Then the Klave recreated it for her, and she was
happier than she had been since the jump. But we
jumped again, and it was gone again; now, she often
put her hand where the ring used to hang, remember-
ing it as vividly as if it were there .... It represented
Albert's offer that Arlene never had time to accept.
I put my arm around her. On Earth it had been over
three hundred years--three hundred and forty, to be
exact, adding up all our trips. But still, for us it had
been only four months since we went on without
Albert, and only five months since we saw Jill ...
whatever her last name was.
     It was all pretty damned confusing. I just couldn't
seem to wrap my brain around all this relativistic
bouncing around the galaxy. And we were at least
another hundred years away from home, even if we
started today and headed straight back!
     "Fly," Arlene said, "let's keep a good watch tonight
when we interact with these ... people. Maybe we'll
pick up some intel that will either blow this theory
away or--or confirm it." I held up a fist; gently, she
rapped it with her own. But the normal Arlene
Sanders would have smacked it so hard, a big Marine
"fist salute," that my knuckles would have been
ringing for several minutes.
     That evening, as we followed the officious jerk of a
clipboard sergeant to the mess, people stopped talking
when we approached and cringed as we brushed or
bumped them. We were celebrities . . . but celebrities
on a freak show. See the monsters! Beware, for their F-
A-I-T-H may be infectious!
     This time, I paid particular attention. We definitely
climbed higher than the midpoint of the ship could
possibly be, so Arlene was right: the ship was built for
gravity always being the same direction. They must
have had an artificial gravity generator.
     The mess hall was actually a long narrow room,
almost like a corridor, with a center table along which
people sat in individual chairs. With a guard holding
each of my arms, the overcaptain walked us down-
stream right on top of the table itself! I labored not to
step in anyone's plate of food or kick over any wine
glasses.
     The pair of guards slapped me down in a central
chair and locked a metal band around my waist like a
seat belt. I didn't try to tug at it; it was pretty clear I
wasn't going anywhere. They plopped Arlene down in
the chair directly opposite me, locking her in as well
with a resounding click.
     The room was darker than I preferred, but after the
Fred bases and Fredworld, we had gotten pretty used
to darkness. Each person had a different set of plates
and silverware, and when they ate, they hunched
forward and hooked one arm around their plates as if
worried the guy on the other side was going to steal
their food--a lot like a former convict my father used
to employ when he worked managing the Angertons'
farm.
     Equal number of guys and gals. Now that I looked
close, I noticed that nobody wore exactly the same
uniform. Like in the United States Army before the
twentieth century, everybody had his own variation
on a common theme: Overcaptain Tokughavita, to my
immediate right, wore dark blue trim around the
seven pockets on the front of his uniform blouse; the
woman sitting next to him had no trim, and the two
guys opposite us had five and six pockets instead of
seven. The farther away from the overcaptain, down
the table, the wilder the variation: I saw a hat that was
a cross between the Revolutionary War tricorner and
a Texas ten-gallon, one woman had mini-wings stick-
ing out the backs of her shoulders. The uniforms (is
that the right word when they're not uniform?) tended
toward red and burnt umber at the extreme left of the
table, where the hats flattened out and looked like
berets with spikes.
     Suddenly, I noticed Sears and Roebuck at the
leftmost end of the table, but they didn't look at me.
They must have known we were here. Nobody could
have missed our ceremonial entrance, walking along
the tabletop--nobody else entered that way!
     People trickled in and out all through the meal. I
began to get the idea that these humans made virtu-
ally a fetish of individualism verging on the solipsis-
tic: each person lived in his own little world, almost
unaware of anyone else except when he needed some-
thing from outside.
     The food was different for each person, too--none
of it very appetizing from my point of view. My main
course tasted like boiled steak in suitcase sauce. But it
was better than the Fred food, even the blue squares,
and I was reasonably sure that humans couldn't have
changed much biochemically in only two hundred
years, so the food was probably nutritious enough to
keep me and Arlene alive.
     Once, someone dropped a knife with a clatter, and
a whole section of table panicked! Then, when they
saw it hadn't killed anyone, they returned to their
meal as if nothing had happened.
     During the meal, there was certainly a lot of intel to
pick up; in fact, it seemed these humans didn't even
have the concept of classified data or even personal
discretion. Arlene was right; all the big bursts in
creativity occurred just about sixty years ago. But
there were no Newbies that they reported.
     Sears and Roebuck didn't say a word to us; they
acted as if they had never seen us before and weren't
particularly interested now. I took the hint and left
them alone, hoping they hadn't abandoned us and
were just playing some game to get on the humans'
good side.
     The crew of the ship--called different names by
different crewmen, of course, but mostly called Disre-
spect to Death-Bringing Deconstructionists--still
seemed fascinated by our faith, me in God, Arlene in
her fellow man. They inched toward us as if afraid to
touch, still worrying about "catching" faith. You bet
your ass it's infectious! I thought. I made as much
contact as I could, putting my hands on people's
shoulders, shaking hands (they knew what it meant
but didn't like doing it--it meant recognizing the
existence of other people), kissing the girls. I got
about as much response from the latter as you would
expect .... It was like kissing nuns.



     11

     The crew mobbed us, asking all sorts of basic
questions, baby questions, about faith and hope.
"What if have faith in something and doesn't happen?
Can hope for someone to suffer? Does matter if have
faith in yourself but not in external God?" I sensed a
purposefulness sweeping the room, centering first in
one person then another, almost as if an inquisitive
intelligence were flitting from brain to brain, asking a
question, then moving on to the next person.
First, Overcaptain Tokughavita asked, "How can
still have faith in basic goodness of humans if person-
al experience tells otherwise?"
     Arlene surprised me by taking that one; I'd always
thought she was the cynic. "It doesn't matter what
some people do, or even like most people--I mean,
sure a lot of people, maybe most of them, will do bad
stuff when they think no one's looking. But if you've
ever known someone who won't, someone who really
practices his moral system all the time--and I have
known someone like that--then you know what we're
capable of. Maybe we don't always live up to it, but
the basic decency and goodness is in our design specs.
We just need some technical work."
     Then the overcaptain's face softened. "Actually
studied first mission in school; strange to meet leg-
ends in flesh."
     "You read about it?" I asked. "There's a book?"
"Two books. Many books, but two originals: Knee-
Deep in the Dead and Hell on Earth. Woman named
Lovelace Jill wrote them, said was on mission with
you."
     Jill! So that was her name. Jill Lovelace?
"Jesus," said Arlene. "Talk about tilting at wind-
mills!"
     "Huh?" It was another one of those patented Ar-
lene non sequiturs void of any and all meaning.
He probed us about our adventures. I was still
stunned at the thought of Jill publishing a pair of
books! It all seemed so recent to me--to me and
Arlene--I had to keep reminding myself that Jill
would have had her whole life to research and write
the books.
     Then the sergeant leaned forward, interrupting the
overcaptain. I waited in vain for fireworks--not only
had they lost their notions of chain of command, but
they were so individualistic they didn't even seem to
have the concept of manners, respect, and politeness.
"Do moral thing because fear divine retribution?"
"No," I said, "that's a complete misreading." The
nuns had discussed this exact point with us many
times in catechism class. "Whatever your morality, if
you're just doing the right thing because you're afraid
of getting caught, that's not ethics--it's extortion."
"Why do right thing when can secretly profit?"
"You do the right thing because humans have an
inner sense of morality, right and wrong, conscience,
whatever, that tells them what is right. If you ignore
it, you feel like crap because you're not living up to--
to your design specs, like Arlene says."
     Then the light of extreme intelligence faded from
the sergeant's eyes, and he sat back, listening while
Arlene gave a highly exaggerated account of our trip
up to Mars. She even went into the first entry into the
UAC facility and the attack by the monsters that later
turned out to be genetic and cyborg constructs of the
Freds. I listened closely; strange as it may seem, I had
never heard that part of the story before ... I was in
the brig being guarded by two guys named Ron--an
interesting precursor to Sears and Roebuck, now that
I thought about it,
     Then an unnamed person asked what this moral
force felt like, then it was back to Tokughavita to ask
how we knew whether someone else we met was
     moral, and so on--a whole damned theology lesson.
The particular questioner changed, but the "voice"
was so similar, I began to get suspicious. Not voice as
in the sound of it as it came from their throats; I mean
the way they strung the words together, diction,
whatever that's called, and the intelligence behind the
questions. Most of the time, these guys were con-
ceited, social-atomist trogs, except when one would
lean forward, cut off whoever was speaking, and ask
The Question.
     I decided early in the evening on 99 percent hon-
esty: I only lie when I see a clear-cut advantage to it,
and I try to keep my lies as close to the truth as
possible. That way I don't get confused. In this case,
my only lie was to imply that all humans had some
sort of faith, back in our time. Arlene took her cue
from me, playing it safe until she figured out what I
was pulling on them, then backing me up. It was a
fascinating evening, and I didn't even care about the
lousy food.
     They hustled us back to the cell and dumped us. We
feigned sleep until we were fairly sure the overt,
obvious guards were gone. "If they've got the room
wired," Arlene said in my ear, pretending to be
romantic, "we're already screwed."
     I grunted and got up. "Let's assume they don't--
but don't plot any plots out loud, just in case."
Arlene sat up, looked around, and gave a little gasp
of astonishment. "Fly, look at the terminal! Or where
it used to be, I mean."
     In place of the magic keyboard that projected 3-D
images was a simple translucent-green sphere, like a
crystal ball. Flickers of electrical impulses kissed the
inside surface. We walked over and stared down at it.
"Cripes," said my lance corporal, "what the hell are
we supposed to do with this?"
     "I could understand them taking away our comput-
er," I said, "but they went to some trouble to put this
here. Ah, an intelligence test?"
     We poked at it, prodded it, even kicked it. An hour
later, we were hot and sweaty but no closer to figuring
out what we were supposed to do with a glowing green
bowling ball glued to the floor. Then Arlene had one
of her serendipitous strokes of unconscious genius:
she leaned over and snarled at the thing. "Why the
hell don't you say something?"
     "Because haven't been asked question," it an-
swered, reasonably enough.
     We jumped back. Then I approached cautiously.
"Did the humans who own this ship put you here?"
"How should I know?" it asked. "Weren't here
when I was activated. You are first people I've seen."
"What's your name?" asked Arlene.
     "Have no name."
"What should we call you?"
     "Address me directly, second person."
I looked at Arlene and grinned. "My turn, as I
recall," I said.
     "Your turn for what? Oh." She rolled her eyes. "Go
for it, Fly." When we first ran into the Freds--their
demon-shaped machines, actually, the ones they sent
for the invasion--we took turns naming the critters
as we ran across them. I wasn't sure whose turn it
really was, but I had a good name in mind.
     "I christen thee Ninepin," I said. Arlene snorted,
and Ninepin didn't respond. "Ninepin, are there any
more like you?"
     "Others like me, not like me," it answered crypti-
cally. "I am prototype, far advanced over other sys-
tems on ship or on other ships."
     "When were you created?" asked my comrade.
"Was first activated four hours, seventeen minutes
ago. Construction time six hours, eleven minutes.
Design first logged into ship system thirty-eight min-
utes before construction began."
"You, ah, say you're far advanced over the other
ship's systems?" I asked. "Aren't there any proto-
types, intermediate steps, trial runs?"
     "No."
"Nothing? They just jumped straight from that
terminal we used to have here--to you?"
     "Yes, unless secret experiments unlogged."
"What are the odds of that?" Arlene asked.
     "Infinitesimal. Less than 0.00001 percent proba-
bility."
     Arlene and I looked at each other. "Kiddo," I said,
"this goes top far. This is exactly the sort of thing we'd
associate with Newbies. I've been thinking--you
know your Edgar Allan Poe. What's the best place to
hide something?"
     "In plain view," she said, drawing her red eyebrows
together and frowning.
     "What could be plainer than looking right at these
humans?"
     "Fly, we already decided that they really were
humans, not Newbies in disguise."
     I smiled as she started to catch on. "Yes, those are
humans, A.S., but what's inside them?"
     Now her brows shot up toward her hairline.
"You're saying the Newbies have implanted them-
selves inside the humans?"
     "It's a possibility, right? They evolve smaller and
smaller, and eventually they wriggle into their host
to--what did the Newbie say? To fix them. Maybe
they figured we were closer to proper functioning than
any of the other races in the galaxy because our rate of
technological and social evolution is so much closer to
the Newbies'."
     "Ninepin," I said, "have you been following our
conversation? Do you know who the Newbies are?"
"Yes and no." I scratched my head and looked at
Arlene, who grinned.
     "You asked two questions, Fly: yes to the first, no to
the second."
     "Ninepin: are there any other species on this ship
besides human?"
     "Yes. Two."
Arlene spoke up. "Is one of those two species a
paired group of bilaterally symmetric, bipedal crea-
tures with short legs and pointy heads?"
     "Yes. Others call them Klave."
"Sears and Roebuc