Endgame (18 page)

It was enough: at the peak of the overcaptain's protestations of eternal belief, we shoved his paw into the machine and sacrificed another chunk—Arlene found a shortcut to the atomic level of magnification . . . and by God and Toku's right hand, the little rings of intelligent molecules, the evolved specimens of Newbie-Resuscitators, were all dead and folded in upon themselves!

Well, hell, there's nothing like faith
confirmed
to be faith infectious. Tokughavita ran off, and within fifteen minutes, he was back with two buddies—one, the bodyguard we had laid out with the super-taser. It was an uncomfortable moment, but I went into my tent-revival act again, a little glibber this time, and in forty-five minutes I had two more “purified” souls fighting among themselves to be my apostles.

I tried to put a stop to that quickly. There are lines that a good Marine such as Sergeant Flynn Taggart should not cross! I insisted that their faith was in themselves, and anyone could do it; I was nothing special but a loudmouthed preacher-boy in mirror shades and a high-and-tight. But the “ministry” expanded like an epidemic; less than half a day passed before we had “converted” thirty men and twelve women, and all of them jumped to the conclusion that I was the dude they should have faith in. Yeesh! Arlene smirked, pointing out, “Whatever works! It's the faith itself that inoculates—doesn't matter what goofy thing or person the faith is in.”

The women were harder to convert. They were too logical, too rational—they didn't respond well to emotion or feelings of community. Those few we got we won by pointing to the men and saying, “See? It works, damn it!”

This gave us a huge army of forty-four, almost as many as we had in Fox Company (only two jarheads, Arlene and I, but we made up for it by having no frigging officers!). With our company newly christened the Fearsome Flies, we struck like lightning, seizing the aft third of the
Disrespect to Death-Bringing Deconstructionists
in a brief but unfortunately bloody battle. I arrayed them in a staggered chevron; the point struck the unprepared engine-room guards, who didn't resist at first because they couldn't believe their own shipmates were seriously assaulting the position.

Our own boys fought like demons, had lost their fear of death! At least for a time, while the “conversion” was fresh. For the first time in their long miserable lives of utter materialism and despair at their own mortality, they had
faith
that they would survive after death—faith that Arlene and I gave them.

All right, it was false faith; I was no God or prophet. But faith itself was a living thing that inoculated them, protected them against not only the Newbies
but against the despair of thinking it was all futile. Decadence hadn't worked to stave off the feelings; they were still there after centuries of trying to forget them. Now . . . now they were normal humans again, fighting and killing with a pure heart.

Liberated from the paralyzing fear of their own nonexistence, they flung themselves into battle with true joy and abandon . . . which made them five times more effective—and ten times harder to control. We hadn't quite solved the social atomism problem yet!

When the clowns finally rallied and tried to defend the two passageways that led to the
Disrespect
's main ramjets, they fought as individuals. Like barbarian hordes against the Roman legions, they were wheat beneath our scythes. I truly wished they had surrendered, but they had no concept of an overall strategic goal—so they had no way of figuring out that they had lost! Each man continued to fight as if he alone were the crux of the battle. I personally killed two Asian men who planted their backs against the ramscoop operation board and fired electrical charges into the wedge. I couldn't bring myself to shoot a woman, but I saw her go down under Tokughavita's deadly aim with a needle gun of some sort.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“You would die yourself.”

“I'll go to a better place.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“No.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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