Endgame (22 page)

W
e climbed down a ladder so tall I got vertigo and almost dropped off to my death. I led, my gaggle of monstrapostles spread above me. The ladder was at least a kilometer long, much longer than in the real world—if that was the real world the first time—obviously taken from a bitter, scary, nightmarish memory. At the bottom of the ladder was a small open elevator—a wire cage into which we all piled. It ground downward, scraping the walls of the shaft and groaning in agony at carrying so many.

I started to get the shakes as the elevator led us into the high shelf-room; below us, I remembered, was a whole herd of pinkies. And so far, the pinkies had turned out not to have enough brains even to listen to my conversion speech. Maybe they were pre-verbal; I certainly couldn't hear any language in their snarls, grunts, and screams of rage or pain.

Sighing, I bellied up to the edge of the floor, looking down on the churning floor that was actually a couple of dozen pink mouths-on-legs wandering around the room, squeezing past each other, tripping and shuffling together, every so often screaming and chomping on one another. I sighted more or less along the barrel of the over-and-under, which didn't have a forward sight, and squeezed off the first round. My spineys
joined in, throwing snotwads, while Olestradamus and Dodd shot over the spineys' shoulders. Between the seven of us, we spread pinkie guts all over the room, leaving nothing after two minutes but the hot quivering corpses of twenty-five pink demons.

My ears rang from the banging of the firearms, just mine and Dodd's, but it was close quarters, and the room echoed with every shot. The acrid stench of fricasseed pinkie burned my nostrils and throat, but at least they were all dead.

I hopped lightly down the shelf and onto the killing floor. My cohorts thudded down like a herd of elephants. We headed down the corridor toward the final elevator, the one that led down to our old friends, the hell princes.

Just before we got to the lift, we passed the infamous crack where I'd seen Arlene's skull and crossbones pointing out the way she'd gone. I stopped and stared wistfully, wishing I could see my buddy again. Was she in her own version of the Phobos facility? Or was she still somewhere ahead? Last time, I'd found her in the first room in the Deimos installation, where I jumped after finding the Gate.

This time, I turned away sadly and started up the corridor. As I walked past the crack, a powerful alabaster demon suddenly darted its hand through the crack and into the traffic lanes, grabbing me by the arm! I jerked back out of its grasp, raising my shotgun and hissing for backup.

A vision of violence shambled out of the hole: savage bestial eyes, tendrils red as blood atop the head, dirt and less palatable contaminants caking the body. I jerked my scattergun around to unload a shell into this unholy new creature. But before I could squeeze the trigger, the bestial shape spoke, urgently whispering, “Don't shoot, Fly! It's me! It's A.S.!”

The perspective shifted, and I was staring at Arlene Sanders in the flesh. When she saw the shotgun leveled at her, she squealed like a mouse, then dove
for cover, but I was already dropping the mouth of the weapon and rushing forward to yank her out of the crack.

She held her shotgun half to the ready, panicked eyes flickering back and forth between me and the passel of imps, a zombie, and one pumpkin in my wake. “What the—what the—Fly, what the
hell
is this crap?” Arlene's face was drained of blood; she was trying really, really hard not to simply open fire on the “mortal enemies” at my back!

“Hold your fire, Lance. Meet . . . your new platoon. Fly's Freaks.” Suddenly, I thought about Dodd; while Arlene was reluctantly approaching Slink and the other spineys, I quietly leaned over to Dodd and ordered him into the shadows. I didn't know how Arlene would react; Dodd was the zombie that used to be—

“Jesus, Fly,” she said, “you sure can pick 'em.” We held each other for a few seconds, reveling in the quiet reunion of two soldiers deep behind enemy lines. Then I sent Slink ahead to watch for the hell princes and asked Arlene what she had done for the past two days since appearing in this horrible maze.

“You're going to laugh,” she gloomily predicted.

“Laugh?”

“It's really stupid.”

“Hey, I've got an idea—instead of reporting
on
your report, why don't you just give me your report?”

“Oh, thanks, Sweetie, pull rank. All right, but you're going to freak.”

I put my hands on Arlene's hard, almost masculine shoulders. “Kiddo, I'm going to tear you apart like a wishbone if you don't spit it out. Where have you been the last two days?”

“Here.”

“Yes, yes, in the UAC labyrinth. But how did you get this far? I barely did it last time—more luck than anything else. How did you make it without a scratch?”

“No,
here
here—right here, where you're standing.”

“You appeared here?”

“On this very X.”

I stared, confused. “But why? I appeared back at the entrance.”

“Why?” she asked, turning the spotlight back on yours truly.

“Hell, I don't know! Ask the goddamned Newbies.”

She smiled and turned up her hands. “How should I know why I appeared here? I knew you only had one way to go—down—so I figured I'd just sit tight and wait, rather than stomp all around the place and risk maybe passing you in the dark.”

“The pinkies didn't smell you?”

She laughed, a musical tone not too different from a silver glockenspiel. “Of course they did! They've been up and down this freaking hallway so many times, I'm surprised they didn't dig a trench with their feet. I just ducked inside my hole here whenever I heard them coming; they're not exactly light on their feet.”

We looked up the corridor to where Slink hovered at the doorway, her ear cocked for the sounds of the minotaurs at the center of the labyrinth, the hell princes. Even from where I stood, I heard them screaming and growling, stomping up and down. “They can tell there's something wrong nearby,” I whispered in Arlene's ear, “but if they really knew we were here, I think they'd already have come charging out.”

“They didn't charge me last time I was here, and I made a lot of noise. Didn't notice me until I went through that door and down the stairs. I think they don't hear too well, and they're used to a lot of noise from the pinkies anyway.”

“But they smell something, right?”

Arlene wrinkled her freckled nose and grimaced. “Mainly what they ought to smell is spiney! Don't
take this wrong, Sarge, but your new platoon stinks to high heaven.”

I looked left and right along the dank stone hallway, stones piled on top of each other without any sign of mortar or cement. I looked at my platoon—not as good as Marines, sure, but could anyone do better? “This is what you meant by saying ‘Patrick,' isn't it?”

“Patrick? What the hell are you talking about?”

“Just before the Newbies sucked our brains out. You looked at me and said ‘Patrick,' and I figured you meant to convert the monsters, like Saint Pat converted the Irish heathens.”

She lowered her orange brows, not following the turn of conversation. “I said ‘battery,' not Patrick, you idiot!”

I glared in annoyance. “You
didn't
mean I should convert the demons?”

Arlene waited so long I thought she had fallen asleep. “Fly,” she said at last, patiently, as if to a child, “how would I have known the Newbies were going to send us
here?”

“Oh,” I said, face turning ruddy, “I guess I didn't think of that.”

“I said
battery
—find the battery, the power source. . . . There has to be some connection, a hard connection, between the RAM we're running in as programs and the bus, the motherboard, whatever you want to call it; the thing that everything else plugs into!”

I shook my head. “How do you know they use that kind of configuration in this computer?”

“I don't know, but they probably use something like it! This intense and
fast
a simulation—remember what the Resuscitators said about wanting everything to move fast?—that sucks a lot of juice. Basically, the faster you want to go, the more energy you need, and it's got to come from somewhere.”

“All right, so there's a power source. So what? We can't shut it off—we'd die.”

Arlene blew air out her closed lips in exasperation.
“We don't shut it off! That's our key, that's the door. . . . If we can piggyback the datastream that defines
us
inside this simulation onto that energy flow, we can back out of this freaking place and into the rest of the computer, maybe even into the operating system of the Resuscitator ship.”

“You think we're on the ship? Why?”

She shrugged, looking so much like Arlene I got chills. “What else are they going to do, hang around the rock we just left? What's Skinwalker to them? It's probably just the nearest planetary system to Newbie prime. Why else would they decide to come here?”

“Well . . . the Newbie we had on the
Disrespect
was part of the invasion fleet that wiped out the Fred; what if . . . what if they came to Skinwalker for a more important reason?”

“What?”

“Maybe they came here in search of us?” She stared, not saying a word, so I continued. “Maybe they picked up some mention of us and our so-called nonbiological status, and how much that scared the Freds, when they annihilated them. So then they went out hunting for us. Maybe they knew this was our nearest base; maybe there was some record among the Freds.”

“Couldn't have gotten here in time. We came on a lightspeed ship—no message could come faster, and there was no settlement here when we left Earth, anyway.”

I shrugged. “They were on their way
here,
though. Our prisoner said so!” Arlene slowly shook her head, eyes closed, then she massaged the bridge of her nose.

No question, this really, truly was my buddy; every mannerism was exactly right. The Arlene Sanders in this computer world wasn't just an alien program designed to fool me: somehow, the Res-men really had built a device that sucked her soul out and trapped it here. Until I had found her, I had my doubts.

I stared up at Slink, who looked tense but not frantic. Evidently, the gruesome red fiends were still agitated but hadn't yet decided to investigate. “Hey Lance, you really want to charge through that door and fight the hell princes?” I asked.

“Not particularly, Fly-boy.”

“How's about we set the spineys and the zombie to making this crack wide enough for all of us?”

Arlene raised one eyebrow—an expression she had practiced night and day for months because of some television character who did it. “Highly logical, Captain.”

I recoiled in horror. “Good God, don't commission me as an officer! Officers have to go to college, and you know what I think of
college
grads.” She ought to; I'd only spelled it out a thousand times! See, at Parris Island, I was an assistant DI when I first made corporal. You give a recruit an order, and even if he doesn't understand it, he will, by God, run off and try to do
something.

But Gunnery Sergeant Goforth used to be a DI over at Quantico in the Marine Corps Officer Candidate School, and he told us that when he gave an officer candidate an order that the kid didn't understand, he would stand there like a dummy and try to
clarify
it! “Sir, this candidate does not understand the drill instructor's order!” Gunny Goforth went bugfreak trying to get the candidates to do something,
anything,
anything but just stand there and discuss the situation!

The gunny especially hated, when he gave an order, the sort of rummy way the candidate would just say
“sir?”
—with a look of utter bewilderment—like he'd never even heard of such a command. Like
no one
had ever heard of such a command . . . like nobody in his right mind would ever
dream
of issuing such a bizarre command!
“You falkin' piece of shee-it! Just falkin' pick up th' falkin' FOD off'n th' falkin' RUNway and don' falkin' say another falkin' ‘SIR,' or I's gone to rip
your falkin' HAID off and YOU-rinate down yo' neck!”
Gunny Goforth was from South Carolina, and his hatred of college-educated officer candidates was legendary.

It was the college education; I was morally certain of it. They say college teaches you how to think, but I think it really teaches you how to jerk gunnery sergeants around by the short hairs.

I whistled very low, catching everyone's attention. I set Olestradamus to guard the door instead of Slink, and all the spineys—and Pfc. Dodd—came forward to tear down the wall, or enough of it that we could all escape the way Arlene did last time. I'd deliberately kept him in the shadows. I wasn't sure how Arlene would react to her former lover, now zombie.

I wished I could have softened the blow somewhat. Maybe I handled it all wrong. When Arlene saw Dodd, she turned white, paler than usual, so much so it was easily visible in the gloom. She fell back against the wall and started hyperventilating, staring at him.

This wasn't the first time she had seen Dodd as a zombie. We caught up with him the last time on Deimos, just after jumping through the Gate—the same Gate that was just outside the crack we were working on. That time, he shambled out of the blackness ready to blow us apart, reworked so thoroughly he didn't even recognize his once and future intended.

I was sick back then, sick at heart. I knew I would have to kill the SOB, and Arlene would hate me forever, and hate herself for hating me when I only did what I had to do. But a miracle happened, the first one I'd seen on that trip, but not the last. Arlene suddenly found it inside herself to shove me out of the way and kill zombie-Dodd herself; that way, she couldn't really hate anybody.