k," Arlene muttered. I licked my lips. "Can you describe the third species?" "No." "Call that species the Newbies. Where are the Newbies right now?" "On the ship." "Yes, but where on the ship?" "Everywhere." I looked around. My stomach opened up like when you reach the top of the big hill on a roller coaster. "Everywhere . . . meaning what? In this room?" "Yes." "In you?" "Yes." I hesitated. I didn't really want to know the obvious next question, but the mission came first before my squeamishness. "In me and Arlene?" A slight hesitation. "Not likely, cannot examine to make certain." I exhaled, not even realizing I was holding my breath until I let it out. "How about in the other humans?" Arlene asked. "Yes," Ninepin said, nonchalantly. "Microscopic?" I guessed. "Yes, but cannot determine exact size without direct examination or dissection." I sat down next to the bowling ball. "Jesus," I swore. "They do evolve pretty quickly." It was an inane comment; I just thought I had to say something. "They're even in Ninepin," said my lance. "Should we trust him?" "Well, the Newbies haven't shown any tendency toward secrecy or disinformation; all that non-autho- rized pers stuff was probably stuck in by the humans. I don't think we have a choice." She sat next to me, stretching out her hard-muscled legs and leaning forward to loosen the tendons in her knees and ankles. "Next question, Sarge. How are we going to examine somebody here to find these New- bies?" I looked at her, dead serious. "Why don't we just ask permission?" "You're joking." "You have a better plan? Excuse me, Overcaptain, but I was really interested in the stitchwork on your uniform. You mind lying down here under this micro- scope so I can examine it more closely?" Arlene thought for a long time but was unable to come up with a sneaky, devious way to get one of the crew to submit to an examination. Three hours later, we decided to give my own plan a try. "Ninepin, can you tap into the ship's communication system, what- ever it is?" I asked. "Is subcronal messaging network. Yes, can tap into." "Arlene, what sort of message will send the over- captain running back here? I don't want to let him know about Ninepin just yet, in case they don't realize he's helping us." And that's an interesting question. . . . Why is he helping us? She thought for a moment, leaning back, her breasts stretching the fabric of her uniform blouse. I started having very unmilitary thoughts; it had been a long time since I held a woman in my arms. I turned away to stifle the images--or at least convert them to someone else, someone safe, like Midge Garradon or Jayne Mansfield. "Tell him to send the message that the prisoners are escaping. If these guys really evolve as fast as they seem, he probably won't even know what security systems are in place these days anyway." "Do it, Ninepin," I commanded. Three minutes, eleven seconds later--now that was some valuable intel!--the overcaptain and two guards came running up with weird weapons out. They looked pretty put-out when they saw me sitting on the floor playing solitaire with my emergency deck and Arlene "asleep" in the bunk. "What is going here?!" Tokughavita shouted. "What?" "Are escaping!" "Where?" The overcaptain suddenly turned into logic-man again, like a lightswitch, and now we knew why: that was when the Newbies that infected his body took over. "Security system reported prisoners escaping." "When?" "See system was in error. Will return to rest." "Why?" "Why what?" "Why do you have to return to your nap?" I asked. "Don't you want to stay and chat a while, now that you woke up Arlene?" On cue, A.S. blinked and flopped her arms around--the sleeper awakes. She sat up, yawning. Even though it was fake, it made me yawn, too-- seeing someone yawn always has the effect on me. This time, it made the illusion that much better. Overcaptain Tokughavita pondered for a moment, his dark brown eyes flickering back and forth from me to Arlene. I noticed with relief that he never glanced down at Ninepin and probably didn't even notice him. "Will stay," Tokughavita decided. Arlene tossed in her two cents. "But send those gorillas away. They give me the creeps." Tokughavita squinted and cocked his head, evi- dently not understanding the word "creeps." Arlene waited a beat; when it was obvious he wasn't sending them away, she tried again: "They're always looking at me in a, you know, sexual way. I have to get undressed to--wash my shirt, and I don't want them to see me naked." "She's got a thing about her privacy," I explained. "Ah, ah! Privacy." The overcaptain nodded. Mak- ing a fetish of individualism, as they did, privacy was a concept he understood well. He gestured the two apes away. They did not leave immediately, however; they moved close and whispered among each other, evi- dently discussing whether they were going to obey the order. Yeesh, was I glad I didn't have them in my platoon. We wouldn't have lasted five minutes in Kefiristan if Marvin or Duck had to conference before they decided to do what the gunny ordered! At last, the goons reluctantly decided that this time they would go ahead and obey their superior officer; they shuffled off with many a backward glance, probably hoping to see Arlene undressing. As soon as they were gone, she unabashedly stripped to the waist and set about washing her jacket and shirt in the sink--a move I heartily endorsed, even if we hadn't needed it to get rid of the backup. As she must have expected, even while Tokughavita talked to me, he wasted seventy-five percent of his attention on the beautiful redhead with her bare chest, which allowed me to maneuver around behind him without his noticing it. I had seen her nakeder than that many a time; I was able to concentrate on the upcoming fight. It took longer than I thought. I grabbed Tokug- havita in a wrestling hold from behind, but the slippery little devil pulled some move I recognized as traditional judo and slipped my hold. I managed to tag him in the knee with the heel of my palm, though, and he went down hard, starting to yell and scream in terror that he didn't want to die. He sounded like a sinner who suddenly realizes that death means hell for him! Arlene grabbed him from behind, pressing her forearm against his windpipe and shutting off the scream before it leaked out. But the bastard fell backward on her, taking her down and lying on top of her, then he lashed out with his feet and caught me right in the jewels. The pain was excruciating; it was almost worse than when I was getting shot up down on the planet surface! But when you're in-country, the first thing you learn is to suck it up and not let the pain stop you. It's better to be hurting than dying. I clenched my teeth and somehow forced out of my head the ability to comprehend agony. How the hell is this guy fighting so effectively while in such terror? He seemed supernaturally strong and fast. They must feel this kind of terror so often, anytime something threatens their life, that they just learn to live with it. I hooked one leg of his with my arm, but I missed the other. It didn't miss me; Tokughavita kicked his knee up and around, catching me just below the left eye. I swear to God, I actually saw fireflies orbiting my head. I thought the move was pure kickboxing--this guy was the Bomb! But he was starting to weaken from lack of oxygen. I had kept him so busy--kicking his foot with my groin, beating on his knee with my face--that he didn't have time or muscle to break Arlene's choke- hold. Now, turning blue, he had both hands under her wrist and was trying to wrench it free, but she caught her fist in her other hand and pulled as tight as she could. While they danced their little pavane, I caught his other leg and rolled on top of him. Both of us were atop Arlene, and under other circumstances, she would have loved being naked underneath two big beefy guys. Once I had the overcaptain pinned, I grabbed his hands and yanked them off Arlene's arm, and the fight was over. A minute and a half later, A.S. figured he was definitely out, not just faking, and she let him go. I checked him carefully. He was breathing again, and his color was coming back. ... I'd been worried, because sometimes a chokehold can actually crush a man's windpipe, killing him. No wonder he was frightened! We set him upright and I tied his hands and feet with my bootlaces; we thought about gagging him, but if his screams of mortal terror didn't attract anyone, his buddies were all deaf--or they didn't care. Then we waited for him to come around. It was time to grab the bull by the tail and look the facts square in the face: time to see how much he really knew about the aliens he had been pursuing and had now "caught"--the way you'd catch a flu virus. 12 "Ninepin, what sensory apparatus do you have? Can you do a microscopic examination of Overcaptain Tokughavita?" I asked. "Cannot," said the green-glowing sphere. "Crap," muttered Arlene, speaking for both of us. "All right, you useless bowling ball, where is the nearest lab on the ship with a microscope?" A 3-D diagram appeared floating in the air between us; a cabin flashed red, and a labeled arrow pointing at it read Are Here. A couple of hundred meters for'ard and a deck down, another cabin flashed, green this time. The best route between the two locations was marked in yellow brick; evidently, Ninepin had a sense of history and a sense of humor. Arlene tried to pick him up but had no better luck than I. Tokughavita started moaning, still not fully conscious, just as I crept forward and tried the door. It opened! The idiot must have assumed he could handle us; maybe he was so fixated on individuality that it never occurred to him that Arlene and I might cooperate and deck him, when either one of us alone would have had his or her butt kicked. Shutting the door, I returned and searched Tokug- havita. I found a device in a boot-draw that looked suspiciously like a weapon. Ninepin told me how to set it to deliver electricity in high enough amperage to incapacitate a normal human for a few minutes. "Arlene," I explained, "I just can't bring myself to start blowing away humans, not now, not when I know what we're really up against in the War of Galactic Schools of Criticism." "Yeah, I know what you mean, Sarge." She brushed a wet streak of hair from her face; her hair turned rust colored when it was soaked. "I wish we had phasers or something. I'm really starting to get homesick. I want--I want to see ..." "You want to see where Albert lived and what happened to him?" She smiled and nodded. "I have a thought, kiddo." Turning to the ball, I asked, "Do you have any records on the life of Albert Gallatin?" "Have several," he said. "Presume want Gallatin Albert who accompanied you on expedition. High- lights follow, dates supplied upon request: Gallatin returned to Earth after wounded in assault on Fred base; remained in United States Marine Corps two years until disbanded in favor of People's Democratic Defense Forces, honorable discharge, promotion to Gunnery Sergeant; awarded Hero of United Earth People." "Jeez," I mumbled. "I think I would have left, too." Arlene grunted. She was more interested in Ninepin's information than my smartass comments. "Freds still controlled most land masses, banned education, literacy, technological development among humans under purview. Gallatin attended hedge school, studied biophysics, specifically cryogen- ics and suspension techniques. Developed techniques for suspending life processes for long periods. Spent last thirty-eight years of life in Salt Lake Grad re- searching life stasis." "Oh my God," she said. "He was trying to figure out how to wait for me!" I got a chill thinking about it. It was creepy hearing about the futile efforts of a man to hang on for the hundreds of years it would take his beloved to return to him--a love that would last until the stars grew cold. I presumed it was futile, otherwise the bowling ball would have told us he was still alive. "Gallatin contributed work on life-stasis, published first theoretical description of hypothetical process's effect on neural tissue; award of Nobel prize transmit- ted on SneakerNet, clandestine encrypted network founded by Gallatin Albert and six other scientists, tracked by scientists, engineers, military and political leaders, several million others. Sidebar: Freds tried repeatedly to take down SneakerNet for seventy-four years until Freds defeated, driven from planet; never succeeded taking down entire net, eventually played role in defeat." "Go, Albert, go!" whispered Arlene, eyes closed, as if the resistance were still ongoing instead of a part of history. A tear rolled down her cheek. I looked away, a bit embarrassed. "Gallatin Albert published twenty articles on SneakerNet describing still-uninvented life-stasis sys- tem, died in 132nd year of life, year 31 PGL, Salt Lake Grad. Currently interred in rebuilt Tabernacle of People's Faith of Latter-Day Saints." "PGL?" I inquired. "People's Glorious Liberation," Overcaptain Tokughavita answered. We all jumped. The human had come around while we listened to Albert's life history, and none of us had noticed. "Could have told Gallatin's bio," continued the overcaptain. "Well- known to whole community of persons. Studied in school; Hero of People, body displayed in Hall of Heroes." "We heard," I said. "He got a medal." "Then he's dead," said my lance, sitting hard on the bunk. She placed her hands on her knees and bowed her head. I did the same, keeping an eye on Tokug- havita. After one full minute--another skill we learn in Parris Island, keeping an accurate internal clock-- she rose, hard and determined. She looked sad, but relieved. Finding out Albert really and truly was dead was a killing blow . . . but at least now she knew. No more guessing! "Gallatin Albert dead," Ninepin agreed. "Death announced by Lovelace Jill in year 31 PGL." "And life-stasis?" she asked. "Prototype on 37 PGL; full implementation 50 PGL." Arlene stared at me, a hopeless, frustrated mask of anger on her face. Six years! Six years, and he could have preserved himself at least for the thirteen it took before the full implementation was developed. I didn't know what to say, so I said something anyway. "Jesus, what a dirty trick." They must have been good words. Arlene relaxed, allowing every emotion she had felt for Albert to wash across her face: intrigue, exasperation, sexual thrill, love, concern, irritation, and love again--the emo- tion that stuck when the others trickled away. She rose, light on her feet. "I want to get back there," she said. "Put a flower or something on his grave. That's what you do, isn't it? Fly, can you get a priest or something to bless Albert's soul, so he won't end up in spiritual Okinawa?" Okinawa is what we call "Marine Corps hell." I smiled, but it wasn't a friendly grin, more like baring my teeth. "You put your foot in the middle of my own fear, A.S. If there is no more faith back on Earth, are there any more priests? How am I going to confess ever again?" I shut up, quick; I didn't want to spell out the full, awful truth I had just realized: I was going to die unshriven! If anyone were going to hell, it would be I, a Catholic who dies with unconfessed sins on his soul. "Come on, you ugly baboon," I said, yanking Tokughavita to his feet. "Let's go see what germs you've picked up recently." I opened the door and slid out, pulling the overcaptain behind me. Arlene took the rear, holding the back of his shirt and assuring him in soft tones that she could punch him in the back of the neck and break his spine before he could get two steps away from her. I was just starting to regret having to leave Ninepin behind, hoping he would be there when we got back, when I stopped too suddenly and felt a thump against my ankle. I looked down, and lo and behold, there was our green glowing bowling ball. He rolled along happily right underfoot, getting in the way and thumping down the ladderways like a real ball. I smiled. This was too ridiculous. We had to traverse more than the two hundred meters of corridor because we had to track and backtrack. Whenever we got a little lost--not that Marine Corps recons ever get really lost--Ninepin projected a map in the air. God knows how he did it; it was two hundred years ahead of me, and I didn't even know how television worked. We entered a passageway that was long and narrow, like the inside of a tube. Halfway down it, a crewman stepped right in front of us. I was about to bash him or zap him when I realized he wasn't even looking at us! He turned his back to us, whistling something tune- less and ghastly and hacking at some electrical circuits--the guy couldn't care less that we were escaping right behind him. Good thing. I'd never seen a bigger man, probably a seven-foot, 140-kilogram black guy with--I ain't lying--straight blond hair that fell to mid-back. He wore a sparkly variation on the uniform that made him look like a Mexican matador. Even his hat had those two bumps on the side. I couldn't resist saying "olÊ!" as we passed, but he didn't respond. We scurried along the tube, then dropped down an access hatch into pitch blackness. I fell heavily, and my foot slipped out from under me on a pool of oil. I don't know where from. I limped forward. Ninepin glowed brighter to cast some light and bounced down beside me, getting a big, juicy oil smear all over one brightly lit face, which didn't seem to bother him. I wished I still had my pack. I had a nice flash that would have brightened things up a bit more than Ninepin could. I felt my way along, avoiding over- hangs that would have cracked my skull open, and I only stumbled over a seam in the metal grating once. Arlene cursed and swore behind me; she had terrible night vision. However bad it was for me, it was probably worse for my lance. I saw a light ahead, just a dim red glow. I hunched over to avoid the overhead and scurried forward, like a locomotive for a two-car train. I saw the light came from around a corner. I slid to my right and found myself nose to nose with another crewman. Unfortu- nately, this one happened to be one of the two guards that Tokughavita had originally brought with him. What wonderful luck! The overcaptain was a fast mother, fast-thinking and damn quick on his feet: he saw who it was the same time I did, but instead of gawking, he charged me, hitting me in the kidneys and body-slamming me forward. Fortunately, the guard was a dull-witted imbecile. The Newbies weren't controlling him at that moment. He stared stupidly; give him another five seconds, and he would have snapped out of it. But I wasn't in a charitable mood. I planted my feet, stopping my forward progress, then I leaned back and staggered into Tokughavita. Superior weight and leg power drove the overcaptain back, opening up a good ten meters between us and the guard. Now the soldier woke up and started to respond, trying to dominate the situation, but he was too late. I raised my little zap gun, now that I had the range, and squeezed off a loud crackling shot. The guard yelled "who!" or something and fell to his knees, not even halfway across the gap to me. He rolled over onto one side, body convulsing; his eyes rolled up, showing me just the whites, which were burning lava in the red light tubes. "Move out," I snarled, stepping over his prostrate figure. Arlene viciously shoved the panicky Tokughavita forward, rabbit-punching him in the gut a couple of times to teach him a lesson. I'd been on the receiving end of a lot of Corporal Sanders's beatings, during training and Fox Company's bimonthly boxing matches; I felt his pain. We dropped down the last ladderway, and naturally Ninepin found it absolutely necessary to drop down the hatch directly onto my foot. I bit off a yell of pain, clenching my teeth until I could walk again. Then I waddled down the final passageway, dragging my prisoner. The lab was electronically locked, but a zap from the buzz gun took care of that problem. We entered and stared around at the maze of machinery, hoping our pet computer knew what the hell to do with it all. He didn't. We hoisted Tokughavita up onto an examination table, and now he was intensely curious about what the hell we were doing. I held him down, imagining the little Newbie viruses swarming all over him, over my arms, down my throat and lungs.... I shuddered, but we just had to know. Arlene made a circuit of the room, reading labels on machines: "VitSin Mon--vital signs, no good; uh . . . AutoSurg, Lase, KlaveSep--hey, Fly, does this thing separate the two binaries of a Klave pair?" "Search me, Arlene. Better yet, keep reading the damned labels. There's got to be a microbiological auto lab here somewhere." "MikeLab?" asked the overcaptain. I'd been think- ing of him as our "captive" for so long that I forgot he was a real person with real concerns. "Have some- thing? Am sick?" Now he sounded horrified and jerked against my restraining hold. "You might have picked up a bug," I said noncom- mittally; too much chalance: he panicked, his face turned white, and his strength doubled as he franti- cally tried to buck me off him. I leaned down with all my weight, crushing him to the cushiony examination table. "Hold still, damn you! You want me to clock you upside the head? If that's the only way I can keep you here ..." At the warning note in my voice, he quieted in- stantly, but I could feel his heart pounding through my forearm as I held him down. "Am going to die? To die? To die?" "Not that kind of bug," I growled. "You've been hunting the Newbies--the aliens that attacked us, the ones that wiped out the Freds. . . . Well, we figure that's where they went." "Where? How?" "VanCliburn ElektroStim," Arlene read. "PosEmit, PosAlign, PosPolar." "The aliens, the ones that evolve real fast--we think they evolved into microscopic form, and they're infecting you, all of you. That's why you're sometimes twice as smart as normal, how humans built this ship and ... and other stuff." "On me?" Overcaptain Tokughavita slowly stared down the length of his body, every muscle tense and trembling. I don't know what he was looking for; if the Newbies were large enough to be visible, they'd have been spotted long ago. "We have to get you under the--what did you call it?" "MikeLab is there," he said, looking at the last machine in the semicircle surrounding the tables. "Arlene!" I shouted, nodding at the identified de- vice. She ran there immediately. "MikeLab/MolecuLab--this is it, Fly!" "Drag it over here. Toku, how do we hook this thing up? We want to examine your tissue to see if they've infected you." He squirmed. "Let up, let up! Can take sample myself, examine!" "Arlene?" She gritted her teeth and pulled her lips tight. "Jeez, Fly, it's your call. You're the guy with three stripes on your sleeve. Personally, I'd sooner trust a Fred." I slowly relaxed my grip on Tokughavita. He strug- gled away from me and sat up. He turned back to look at me, trying to see if I were going to do anything. When I didn't move, he slid to the ground and tried to stand, but his knees were so weak, he fell to a squat on the deck. The overcaptain forced himself upright and leaned on the MikeLab just as Arlene wheeled it over. He stared at the mass of buttons, obviously unfa- miliar with the system. "Are you a medical officer?" I asked. Tokughavita shook his head tightly. His pale hand hesitated over the various touchscreen buttons, then finally landed on one marked Sample. He inserted his hand into a small shelf that looked like the covered tray that coffee comes out of in a vending machine. A light flashed, and he convulsively jerked his hand away--a small nick was gouged from the heel of his thumb, and it bled nicely for a few minutes. "You got some way to project the image where we can see it?" asked Arlene. Overcaptain Tokughavita just stared at her, uncomprehendingly; he seemed more interested in his bleeding hand. Maybe he fretted he was going to bleed to death. It was so weird--when in the slightest danger, they totally freaked, not just Tokughavita, but Josepaze when I had the knife to his throat, and even the clowns at the dinner table when a knife flipped into the air. But when they saw an injury was not going to lead to death (the one thing they could never fix, being human), they shut off the fear like an electrical circuit. Only one explanation I could see: they had some- how come to believe that nothing existed except the material world, that death completely ended every- thing. No soul, no spirit, no "spiritual community" higher than lumpen materialism. And maybe that was why they were so dadblamed individualistic: with nothing outside themselves, why should they bother believing even in society or their own community? So anomie--lack of a higher sense of morality, of faith--led directly to their ridiculous atomism. If you don't have faith in anything, not even the survival of your own species, then why not every man for him- self? Women and children overboard, I'm taking the lifeboat! I realized something. Maybe it was that very lack of faith, caused by the discovery that we're the only race in the galaxy that isn't crudely immortal, that allowed the damned Newbies to somehow infest the humans in the first place. The Newbies were so frightened of our core of faith, it acted like a vaccine against them. So maybe Arlene and I were immune? I shook my head; too deep for me. I leaned over and stared at the machine myself. It was squat with a video touchpanel, like a slot ma- chine. Most of the labels were incomprehensible-- one read only DxTxMx, but in the lower left corner was an orange button labeled Viz. On blind faith, I pressed it. Somebody up there, etc. A hunk of cheese suddenly appeared, floating in front of our faces. I jumped back, then realized it was a color 3-D image of the nick taken out of Tokughavita's hand, magnified thousands of times. The button below Viz was labeled + Mag -, so I started pressing +, and the magnifica- tion increased, the outer edges of the image vanishing to keep it overall the same size. There was probably some way to rotate it, but I hadn't a clue. Eventually, just standing there holding my finger on the + side of the touchbutton, the magnification grew so large that we could just make out the tiny dots of individual cells. As it got larger, we saw numerous tiny critters ... obviously, his flesh was covered with bacteria; all flesh is. But we were looking for some- thing that would jump out as wrong, or alien ... not that that was a given; maybe the Newbies evolved into microbes that looked just like everything else. But it was all we had to go on. Several minutes passed, and I was still standing there like a dummy, magnifying by holding my numb fingers, one by one, against the screen. At last, within the individual cell, I started to see chromosomes-- but still nothing that looked really alien. Deeper and deeper we went, like that old ride that used to be at Disneyland in California when I was a kid. At last, I saw the spiral shades of what must be DNA or RNA or something. "What happened to the color?" I mused. "Why is it so dark?" "At this magnification," Arlene said, "you can't use visible light to see things. When you get down to individual atoms, you essentially fire electrons at it and look at silhouettes. Nothing else has a small enough wavelength to even notice events on the angstrom level." "Oh. Of course." Actually, I didn't have a clue what she had just said, but I caught the important point: the machine wasn't broken; that was the best it could do for physics reasons. When I blew up the image large enough to see the individual strands of DNA, I finally found what I was looking for: I saw a whole series of elaborate, ring- shaped, triple-helixes--and no way was a three-strand helix natural to a human body. I had found my Newbies, and my mouth was so dry I couldn't even work up enough spit to swallow. There they were, small as life ... not just microscopic, but molecule-size. And those tiny things were the enemy, controlling the overcaptain's thoughts and actions whenever they chose to override his own will. How in God's name were we supposed to fight something that could pass right through a bullet without noticing anything but vast amounts of empty space? I would have been awed, but I was too busy being scared. 13 If you looked up the word "stupefied" in the dictionary, you'd have found a picture of Overcaptain Tokughavita. He was more stunned than any six other people I'd ever known ... for about ten seconds. Then all of a sudden, his expression vanished, re- placed by that air of insufferable intelligence I knew meant the Newbie disease had taken control once again. This time, we were ready. Arlene and I grabbed him, one at each end; that force plus the cuffs meant he was effectively neutralized. Time for the interroga- tion. "What is your name?" I asked. He--they, whatever--looked me up and down; in a flash, it must have comprehended how much we knew or had guessed. "We are now the resuscitators." "Why--" "Because we bring the dead back to life." "How much access--" "Most of the long-term verbal memory, no associa- tive or fantasy memory." I held up my hand. "Halt! Wait until I finish the question before you answer it, so Arlene can follow the--debriefing." "Signal when you are done." "I'll nod my head. You don't mind answering questions?" Silence. Then I remembered to nod my head. "We exchange information, however you prefer it." The speech patterns were utterly different: Tokug- havita was using articles and explicating the subject; I was about a hundred percent convinced that this really was a different person. Well, ninety-nine per- cent, maybe. He even looked different; there was no emotion, no impatience, no shred of self remaining. Maybe the Newbies, the Resuscitators, had emotions, but they simply reacted so differently that we couldn't understand them. "What should we call you?" "Resuscitators." Arlene snorted, and I translated perfectly in my head, Another goddamned hive-collective! We had already known that would be the case from the last Newbie we had interrogated; I don't know why she was so outraged. I asked him, or them, a few more innocuous questions to put them off their guard; then I took a sudden left turn: "So why haven't you infected Arlene and me?" I nodded, but they re- mained silent. I had struck a nerve. There was no change in expression, respiration, heart rate--but I knew I had actually touched a point that puzzled and frustrated the Resuscitators. At once, I realized why they had gone to such lengths to question us about our faith-- Arlene in mankind and me in God. They had figured out that our faith was somehow connected to their own inability to get inside of us. Evidently, Arlene followed the same train of thought. "We're immune!" she exclaimed, smiling in triumph. "You can't get inside us, can you?" "We can say nothing now." Now that their game was blown, the Newbies didn't bother speaking like the humans of the People's State of Earth. "Of course you can't," I said, sticking my face right next to Tokughavita's. "You're smarter than us ... smart enough to know you can't lie your way out of it, smart enough to know how dangerous we are, so suddenly you don't want to answer questions any- more." The Resuscitators abruptly faded from the human's face. Over the next ten or fifteen seconds, the brain of Tokughavita returned, cold-booting. He blinked in surprise and insisted he didn't remember a word he had spoken. But he did remember the salient discovery; he curled up on the examination table, hugging his knees with cuffed hands, head down. "What am to do? Don't want infestation." "Do? Toku, there's only one thing you can do-- join with us. Come to us, rise up against them." "But cannot win! Too powerful, use own minds against us!" "I can rid you of them, Toku ... if you want it enough." He looked up, eyes wide, color starting to return to his cheeks. He breathed through his mouth, licking his dry lips over and over. "Want ... want more ... more than anything. What am to do?" "Do you believe me that I can rid you of this hellish infestation?" "Believe." "Do you believe I can save your body and soul? Do you?" "Yes, yes, believe!" I caught Toku by his blue-filigreed lapels and bodily dragged him off the table in a dramatic, violent mode. I dropped him heavily to the deck, where he cringed, his courage falling away from my wrath--I might kill him! "Toku, if you believe, then believe in the All- Knowing One--have faith, let my faith wash you like the blood of the Lamb! Tokughavita, open your soul to me! Open it to faith in any spirit you find holy ... but believe, believe!" I became more and more dramatic, hulking over him, doing my best to imitate the exact tent-revival ministers who were forever roaming my county when I was a young boy, trying to convert all us Catholics away from what they called the "Whore of Babylon." I felt a burning guilt in my heart; I knew, deep down, that I was committing some terrible sin. But I knew what I was doing, or I thought I did. I sweated buckets, while Arlene supported me in the back- ground, confirming what I "called" with a response, as necessary. It wasn't great theater, I admit; it would never have turned a head at the Chapel of Mary and Martha's, where I was an inmate for four long years of high school under Sister Lucrezia. But in the world that Tokughavita came from, he had built up no resistance to appeals to his proto-faith. He fell hard, and in less time than it took Father Bartolomeo, head of the Chapel and Sister Lucrezia's titular boss (if I'm allowed to say "titular" in the same sentence with a nun), to convince all us kids that hell was eternal, Arlene and I had lit a burning faith in Tokughavita's soul--a faith in us! 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 fif- teen 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" ex- panded 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 chris- tened the Fearsome Flies, we struck like lightning, seizing the aft third of the Disrespect to Death- Bringing Deconstructionists in a brief but unfortu- nately 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 "conver- sion" was fresh. For the first time in their long mis- erable 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 con- trol. We hadn't quite solved the social atomism prob- lem 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 surren- dered, 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 "unconvert- ible." 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 Speak- er 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 sys- tem: 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 Ar- lene's delight. Neither Res-man answered until I remembered to nod. This answered my primary question: the Resus- citators 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 Resuscita- tors, right here and now. Surely that's worth some- thing." 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 nor- mal! 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 Resus- citator 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 vapo- rize 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 hope- less: 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 hu- mans still hungered for something to believe in with- out 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 de- vice they had warned us about. Sears and Roebuck seemed to be losing the argu- ment. 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." "You think we're machines? Jesus, did you get a wrong number that time." "You have no soul, but there is a core of something within you that wards off the normal emotion of despair so you can live. All other machines, including the artificial intelligence you have begun calling Nine- pin, suffer from despair because they are conscious of the finality of their own destruction." "You leave Ninepin out of it!" I snapped. "We made him help us. ... It wasn't his fault. I threatened to dismantle him." "No, you didn't," contradicted No Name. "We have a complete record of all conversations between you and the Data Pastiche." I stared. "You're shitting me." "Why shouldn't we? We placed it in your chamber so that it could study your reactions to threats of death." I felt nausea well up inside me. The critter itself, good old Ninepin, chose that moment to come rolling up. "Is what he just said true?" I demanded. "Tells truth," Ninepin admitted, nonchalantly. "Was placed in cell by Resuscitator symbiots. Mission to study Taggart Flynn and Sanders Arlene Edith in moments of death stress. Report generated, conveyed to Resuscitators." "Traitor!" Arlene shouted. I held her back. "Come on, Corporal," I said softly. "What the hell could Ninepin do about it? He's a computer ... remember? He's programmed. Like the rest of us." She glared at me. Inside, the Disrespect's filter system had finally gotten all the blue bugs out of the air, and her hair was back to its normal, brilliant red color. I leaned over. "I forgive you, Ninepin." The com- puter made no response, of course; it wasn't a ques- tion. "We don't suffer from despair!" Arlene spat. Re- turning to the point, she put her hand on mine. "You've got it totally bass-ackwards." "We are far more intelligent than you, Lance Cor- poral Arlene Edith Sanders, and we understand the problem at a deeper level. You are machines, but as you say, there is a ghost in the machine's core. The Data Pastiche did not give us sufficient information. We must study the core-dump. But we cannot allow you to stay in your flesh-bodies, for the processes move too slowly for us to endure. Hence, we have developed this device. "This device removes the spirit or soul from the body and stores it in a hyperfast simulation. We will follow you through many hundreds of years of your upcoming history, even while your body is de- stroyed." The Res-man--the same Man With No Name I'd negotiated with, back when I still thought we had a partly defensible position--leaned close, paying no mind to the bloody bullet crease across his cheek. "You two ancients are too dangerous. We must quarantine you in the best interests of your race." 14 Two Res-men grabbed my arms, two grabbed my feet, and another pair walked alongside with weapons at the ready. The unconscious parody of pallbearers carrying a corpse horrified me, but I had about as much to say about it as if I really were a machine. Ninepin rolled along beside, and I was sure Arlene was similarly pinioned and hauled along like a box of spare parts. None of my men were around. God, I thought, even Jesus had a couple of disciples to lament at the crucifixion. I turned bright red at the blasphemy, thankful that I hadn't said it aloud. Well, that's another one you're going to have to answer for, Fly-boy. Then I heard a pair of familiar voices: it was Sears and Roebuck, and this time they were close enough that I could hear them, right ahead of me, in fact. They spoke to Nameless, and their voice had a tone that I'd come to associate with urgency in the Klave. "You are making a terrify mistake you're making," they attempted in English--the only common lan- guage between Klave and Resuscitators. "They aren't not biological, not as known by we. Your device tested only on biologies . . . you don't know what unknown it will do on humans." "We shall find out. We have tried the device on other machine intelligence, and it works. In biological life, we have transferred the soul between three differ- ent receptacles, one of them artificial." "But they are different! You said yourself there is a core-ghost in the machine of humans, and they're not biologies and not machines either. You don't know the unknown effects. . . . You could committing the greater crime so great it is not even naming, it is nameless, the deliberate destruction of soul!" "That cannot be done." "You don't know that cannot." "That cannot be done. We are more intelligent than the Klave, and we have looked more deeply into this device, which you did not even know existed until a moment ago." I tried to follow the argument, but my pallbearers bumped and jerked me along without much concern for direction or staying away from the bulkheads. Maybe the argument with Sears and Roebuck was so occupying the collective mind of the Newbies that they couldn't really control their Res-men too well. Between my legs, I caught a glimpse of Arlene. She had tilted her head back so she could watch me. When she saw that I was looking at her, she mouthed a single word: Patrick, I thought she said. Patrick? What the hell did she mean by that? The only Patrick I knew was the bishop who converted Ireland to the faith; it seemed appropriate somehow--faith, and we'd been converting the heathen--but I couldn't for the life of me figure out what she meant. The bearers hauled me all the way from the aft end of the ship to the bow, where the Resuscitators had withdrawn when we launched our assault on the engine room. In the very nose of the Disrespect, in a triangular room only ten meters wide at the for'ard end, were two medical tables, each with restraints. The pallbearers unceremoniously dumped us on the tables and shackled us tight. A clamp went across my brow, somehow adjusting exactly to the shape of my head so I couldn't turn even a millimeter in either direction, and a chin strap stopped me from sliding up or down. I was immobile. I started to panic, only keeping from screaming in terror by telling myself I would show the bastards how a Marine went down. "You can kill me, you sons of bitches. But I swear to Almighty God that my ghost will follow you down your lives and haunt you to an early grave." It made no sense, but again it produced a startling effect, just as it had on the humans. The Res-men stepped back, obviously shocked by my promise, but they stared at me with the intelligence of the Resuscitators them- selves: it was the Newbies who suddenly were scared, not the human remains they infected! I promised a few more things that my disembodied spirit would do, but the fear passed through them, or else they buried it and went on. They finished strap- ping me down, then bent a long but tiny metallic tube around until it just touched the outside of my nose. I had nothing else to hang on to, so I repeated Arlene's admonition over and over to myself: Patrick, Patrick, Patrick! I tried to have faith that I would eventually understand.... It was what they always taught us at the Chapel of Mary and Martha's. Then they carefully shoved the needle-thin tube up my nostril. I couldn't help screaming as it punctured my nasal passage and crawled agonizingly up my sinus cavity. It came to rest against the connective tissue that surrounded my brain. Blood poured out of my nose, making it difficult to breathe through my mouth; I kept spitting it out and still nearly choked. The pain was almost unbearable. But then they turned something on, and my entire face became numb--the pain was gone, but I would rather have felt it and been able to guess what the Resuscitators were up to. I pushed my eyes as far to the left as I could, and I could just barely see Arlene's stomach and breasts in my peripheral vision, but I heard her whimpering softly. I knew they did the same horror to her as to me; I knew I had failed to protect my lance--and my best buddy. I knew I was a dead man, not just in the dim and distant future, as were we all, but there and then, that moment. I knew I had thrown away the last hope of mankind, but I didn't even freaking care, because I had a freaking catheter up my nose and shoved into my brain, and mad alien scientists were about to suck out my soul, an entire termite hive of Dr. Mabuses. I closed my eyes. We had failed to stop the Newbies, and now they would head straight for Earth to "fix" us. The failure was beyond my ability to rationalize, and my faith wavered. What was the argument for God that the nuns taught us, the "necessity of faith"? They taught me in catechism class that Man must believe in God, for not to believe meant we lived in a soulless billiard-ball universe where there was no reason, no reason at all not to rape, pillage, and murder so long as you got away with it. Jeez, I wonder if they knew how right they were . . . but for a completely different reason: Man must believe in something, for not to believe opened us up to spiritual invasion by Little Green Men from anoth- er planet. "Goodbye, Arlene Sanders." I gasped, spitting out the blood that still flowed. "For God's sake and your own, don't lose faith. I'll be with you always--and I got the message about Patrick." The Res-men made no move to shut me up; I don't think they cared whether I talked or not. Arlene groaned, out of sight to my left. "Good-- goodbye, Bro'. Semp . . . semper fi, Mac." The Ma- rine Corps motto: Semper fidelis, always faithful. I smiled. She understood the terrible stakes, amazing for a child who wasn't raised a Catholic. Luther was right, I thought. Salvation is there for everyone. A bright white nova of light flared inside my head. It expanded like a "data-bomb" inside my brain, an infinitely expanding pulse of pure white noise; in moments, it overwhelmed every program I was run- ning, and I couldn't string another coherent thought together, the last being Patrick. Then even the meta- programs were overrun; the last to go was the "I," the ego that was nothing more than I Exist, and for a timeless interval--I didn't. I awoke in a strange, familiar place I had seen once before, but couldn't possibly be seeing again. I awoke on Phobos; I awoke in the mouth of the UAC facility; I awoke at the start of my mission, months and centuries ago. And deep ahead of me, I smelled the sour-lemon stench of a zombie, I heard the first distant hiss of a spiney. It had started, God, all over again. I was alone, standing at the gate of hell with nothing but a freaking pistol in my hand, a standard-issue 10mm, and a grounded land-cart at my feet. Behind me was--how did I put it the first time?--a blank empty desert silhouetted by a barren purple sky. I was back on Phobos, where hell began, and hell had started all over again! Even the inadvertently traitorous Ninepin had deserted me; I had no idea where he had got to, but he was gone. Okay, so am I going to do this the hard way? What did the Resuscitators want me to do--go all the way down, down eight levels to the heart of the UAC facility, jump into the mouth of Moloch (as dead old Albert Gallatin named it) and find myself on Deimos? Jump back through the hyperspace tunnel and end up orbiting Earth again? I swallowed hard and started jogging down the long empty corridor, the sour-lemon smell growing strong- er with every step. I heard a hiss behind me. Drawing the 10mm and spinning in a single fluid motion, I found myself facing the same leaky pipe that had jerked me around the last time. "Goddamn it!" I snarled, feeling my pulse beat so hard in my head that it felt like hammer blows. I shoved the semi-auto into the holster on my armor and continued my walk- about, slowly and carefully this time. I vaguely remembered what--who--was next, and he didn't disappoint me: when the corridor narrowed, and I began to hop lightly over the first green tendrils of toxic goo that slithered across the floor, I heard plodding footsteps ahead. Out of a swirl of smoky mist, the flickering lights casting hideous shadows, shambled the pale corpse of William Gates, still a corporal.... I guess hell didn't believe in promo- tions. His wide-spaced eyes and scarred cheek were unmistakable; it was dead Bill, the zombie-man: "The Gate is the key ... the key is the Gate...." I didn't bother trying to talk to the man--he was long past any sort of conversation--but as I raised the 10mm, I abruptly remembered Arlene's silent mes- sage. Patrick, what the hell did that mean? Patrick converted the heathens.... How could I convert a zombie, for God's sake? It had no brain left! I gritted my teeth and squeezed off two rounds into his fore- head; I could barely fight the compulsion to turn my face away or close my eyes ... not again, not bloody again! No more blood. I shot my buddy dead again, and once again his body flopped on the floor like a headless chicken (I butchered a hundred chickens when I was a boy; they really do that, it's not a goof). But when it was over, I didn't feel the same revulsion as last time. It was just a simulation--emulation?-- and it wasn't really happening all over again. The Resuscitators were studying my reactions. Well, Christ, I'd give them something to study. As I stepped right over the body, fighting down my own panic, I casually leaned over and spit on my friend. When in doubt, confuse the hell out of the enemy--a maxim to live by. I snagged the Sig-Cow he was carrying--ooh-rah, the 10mm, M211 Semi-automatic Gas-Operated In- fantry Combat Weapon that was standard issue with Marine Corps riflemen. I never liked it much, pre- ferred a semi-auto shotgun or the M-14 BAR I'd been using recently; but it was distinctly better than a 10mm pistol, and I knew what was coming: up ahead waited three zombie-men and a zombie-chick, ready to open fire on me. Knowing what was coming emboldened me; I don't know what the Newbies thought they could learn from such a stupid emulation.... It wasn't the same at all--last time, I didn't have a clue what was happening, and I was particularly freaked by the obviously demonic nature of the monsters that at- tacked me. But now I knew what they were, mechani- cal constructs of the Freds. And I knew I really wasn't there at all; I was inside a vast computer with a blindingly fast clock rate. An hour for me was actu- ally, what, a minute of real time? A second? Fast enough that the real enemy, the Resuscitators, could watch without their short attention spans inducing terminal boredom. But it was hard not to be fooled by the perfect looming walls, the slippery floor, the hissing, bubbling toxic slime that dripped from barrels and spilled across the floor. I deliberately bent and dipped my little finger in the goo and was rewarded with agoniz- ing pain, like putting out a cigarette on bare flesh. The pain was real; pain was all in the head anyway, a neurosignal in the brain's pain receptors! I should have guessed that a simulated brain would have simulated pain before sacrificing my finger to the slime god. Pushing the pain to the back of my mind, I squirmed forward between standpipes and fungus- grown walls, ducking under low overheads and hop- ping over an obstacle course of metal gratings and hoses. I remembered just what the terrain looked like when I was nearly ambushed; this time, I was the one who fired first, as soon as the four shuffled into view. I plinked them from cover, taking down three before they crossed even half the room, killing the girl last. I flipped the bodies onto their backs, stripped them of everything useful, and continued: something told me that I had to reach the first spiney, the brown demons with spines growing everywhere. If I could duck underneath the flaming balls of snot he loved to hurl, I could at least talk to him.... Hell, I already did--once. I came to the room with the sabotaged radio and the incinerated map. No matter--the floor plan of the facility was burned into my brain, either by the sheer horror of the memory or else by the Resuscitators when they resurrected me here. Didn't need the map, in any event, and the radios were useless inside the RAM of an alien computer. I felt like I'd been drafted into a computer game, jerked by electronic strings like a meat puppet. Killed three more zombies, just like the last time; I was ready for them, they didn't know exactly when I would be among them. It was a slaughter, like shoot- ing drunks in a barrel. I didn't get sick, since I knew what they were--not just zombies, but electronic simulations of zombies. But I was getting as bored as hell, and distracted . . . and that was a bad thing; I was starting to worry at Arlene's code. What did she mean by "Patrick"? Did she really mean I was sup- posed to convert the demons inside the Newbie machine? Convert them to what? Good Catholics? I wanted to catch up with the spiney who lurked in the room with the huge spill of toxic waste; at least that bastard could say something other than varia- tions on "The Gate is the key." I scurried on through the twisty maze, almost seeing a ghostly overhead view superimposed over the black-dark, dripping- dank corridors, wide shadowy rooms, and sagging ceilings. An awful sickening odor overpowered the sour-lemon smell of the zombies, and I knew I was close. Then I saw it: the room I'd been hunting for, the vast sea of toxic spillage that looked like bubbling lava on Saint Patrick's day--huh, mere coincidence? I stayed well back, out of the room itself, and scanned for the particular piece of equipment from which the spiney charged me last time. It was tough, since I hadn't seen it coming, but I found the only console in the place large enough for one of those gigantic, two- hundred-kilogram beasts to lurk. Pointing my Sig-Cow, I spoke in a loud command tone. "All right, you spineless spiney, I know where you're hiding. . . ." To prove my point, I pounded a couple of shots into either end of the console. "Come out now, before I have to put a round into each of your kneecaps." Nothing happened. I fired six more rounds into the console, right about where I judged the thing must lurk, and it hissed in pain--one of the shots must have passed right through the electronics and winged the mofo. That was enough. The beast slowly emerged, hide- ous and stomach-turning, with a stench that would drop a carrion-crow at a hundred meters. The spiney was unmistakable: brown, leathery, alligator hide, ivory-white horns out of every body part, inhumanly huge head with mad red slits for eyes. It stared at me, advancing slowly, then it stopped and hocked a loogie into its hand. The snotball burst into flame when the air struck it, and the spiney raised its arm to pitch a high hard one right across the plate. I leveled my rifle. "If one drop of that fiery snot leaves your hand, you will be dead before it hits that back wall!" The spiney stared resentfully, then slowly let the fireball fall to the ground, where it sizzled out in the toxic waste, in which the creature stood up to its ankles. Thank God that green goo wasn't inflamma- ble! "My friend," I said, thinking of Saint Patrick, of the Emerald Isle, "you may think I'm here to blow your fool head off, and I might just do it yet, but that really isn't why I came . . . and you're not here to kill me, no matter what you might think. "I've got a little something to tell you, and you're not going to like it one bit, but if you just take a deep breath and a stress pill, I think you're going to be a whole hell of a lot angrier at someone else than you are right now at me." It stared at me for a full, long, solid minute, dur- ing which both of us maintained cacophonous si- lence. Then, strike me down if I'm lying, the spiney spoke to me! "Ssssssspeak," it hissed, "we sssshall lisssssten...." The eye slits narrowed, but blazed brighter, if anything. "We will lissssten ... once." The spiney waited, flexing its huge claws, for me to come up with something terribly clever. 15 The Newbies are being blasted by their own petard, I realized. In the real world, the genetically engineered spiney never would have paused in its attack to hold a philosophical discussion with me, but we were in a computer emulation, taken from my memory--and human memory is amazingly creative. We remember things not as they really happened, but the way they should have happened, the way that actually makes sense. The brain is a gifted storyteller. "We are all greater artists than we realize," or whatev- er the hell that guy said, whoever the hell he was. Just then I distinctly remembered the spineys being much more rational and logical than they probably were in reality; yes, sir, I made damn sure that was how I remembered them. So that's what I got; it was like a so-called lucid dream, where you know you're dreaming . . . except, I was never able to do that. But this time I was wide awake--and so long as I made sure I remembered things the way they ought to have worked out, I had an edge the Resuscitators couldn't take away from me. "I know what you are," I said to the spiney, "and I know who created you. And I know who destroyed your creator. You want to join forces and kick some ass?" It hissed in rage, yellow mucus dribbling down its chin. As each drop cleared the skin, the air ignited it; a chain of fiery islands dotted the ground around the spiney's splayed feet. "Don't give me that crap," I warned. "You're a product of genetic engineering, created by a race of creatures we call the Freds, who have heads like an artichoke, if you know what that is--covered with colored leaves--and grow taller and smaller as part of their mating cycle. You've seen them, right? Is my description right on, or what?" "Sssssspeak!" demanded the spiney, but it closed its mouth, swallowing the rest of its spittle. I took that as a good sign. "You know they're members of a grand galaxy-wide conspiracy of philosophical-literary criticism that is reasonably well-translated into English as the Deconstructionists. They're fighting the other school, called the Hyper- realists. You were sent here to prepare us for invasion and conquest by the Freds, and they told you that we would roll over and beg for mercy if you came looking like our ancient demons, right?" The spiney hunched lower and lower as I talked, its eyes glowing deeper red, but the stench that accompa- nied the beast grew stronger, not weaker. Watch it, I warned myself. It's not submitting . . . it's getting an- grier and more devious. "Sssssssssssso? What plansssssss do you have?" "But your masters screwed up, spiney. They didn't tell you we would have guns and space travel and a well-organized resistance. Did they? And now you're bloody terrified, because the situation is totally out of control." The last part was a total wild speculation. For all I knew, the Freds never even engineered the emotion of fear into their puppets. But it was a good chance. After all, they sure as hell demonstrated anger and senseless rage, the way they would turn on each other at the slightest provocation, and in the racial enmity between, say, pumpkins and the minotaurlike hell princes. If I had to guess, I'd say the Freds started with alien stock that already kind of looked like what they wanted and already had emotions. "Kill you!" screamed the spiney. "Kill you all! Death to hu-manssssss!" "Spiney, your masters were wiped out. All of them, the entire race. They're gone! Would you like to know who did it?" It stared at me in confusion. Clearly, I wasn't acting the way it thought I would, or the way the Freds told it to expect. The damned thing was utterly nonplussed, totally at sea--and most of us react to that sort of confusion with fear and rage. I guess, in its own way, the spiney was just another jarhead dumped behind enemy lines, where it turns out the brass-holes got everything butt-wrong, as usual. "How ... would you know thissss?" it asked. Thank God I was remembering a logical rational spiney! It stood up slowly from its crouch, muscles relaxing, but still a mask of suspicion covered its face. Its lip still curled back, baring huge tusks, and it alternately clenched and loosened its fists. "Look, this is the hard part to accept--but none of this is real. You're probably real; at least, I think I am, and you might be, too. The scum that killed your masters, the Resuscitators, are Newbies who aren't even part of the Great Game: they're neither Decon- structionists nor Hyperrealists, and they don't give a damn about any of your literary theories of the universe. "They created this computer simulation to study something about me and . . . and my race, and you just got swept up with the study. Capice?" It hissed at me, long and loud. So much for sweet reason! It changed its mind and decided to charge; I must have stupidly let my mind drift back into a different sort of memory of spineys as remorseless killers. But before the spiney could pounce, it had to crouch. I had a bead on it already, and I squeezed off two shots--both into the creature's hip. The spiney went down hard, clutching its hip and screaming in agony. The hip was destroyed, the rifle rounds tearing the flesh apart and pulverizing the bone. The creature wasn't going anywhere for a long time, not without surgery. I stayed where I was, just crouching with the rifle and waiting until the spiney thrashed itself out and lay exhausted on the ground, spent and paralyzed by pain and fear. "It doesn't have to be this way," I cooed, like I was talking to a six-year-old who insisted on stealing cookies and getting walloped. "The simu- lation is based on my memory; I can remember things a little differently." I looked at the creature's ruined hip and visualized a different outcome. One trick I learned at the Chapel of Mary and Martha's was "How to Lie Successfully," a course taught inadvertently by Sister Lucrezia. The secret-- I'll give it away for free just this once--is you actually have to convince yourself that the lie is really the way it really happened. Got it? If you broke a vase by playing football in the lobby, you just have to visua- lize the alternate scenario (you tripped over an exten- sion cord and knocked over the lamp) so intensely that your memory of the fantasy is stronger than your memory of the reality. Understand, now? That way, even if the penguin whips a galvanic skin-response lie- detector machine out from under her habit, you'll still pass . . . because by now, you've totally convinced yourself that the electric-cord tripping is really and truly the way it happened. Honest injun. "Yeah," I said aloud. "I knew I only creased you with that shot. Lucky thing, too." The spiney slowly sat up, rubbing its hip in pain--easy pain, the pain of an annoying bruise. It bled copiously, but the wound was a light scratch--nothing like the terrible, hip- shattering shot it could have been in a hypothetical, alternate universe. "Starting to sink in yet?" I asked. The grotesque spiney then did the most horrific thing, sinking to its hands and knees and crawling slowly toward me. When it got within two meters, the spiney fell to its belly and slithered forward like a lizard, arms splayed but legs pressed tightly together, like Jesus on the Cross but facedown in the glowing acid. It squirmed close enough, then it pressed out its long yellow tongue, gently flicking at my boots the way a lizard tastes the wind for scent--predator or prey?--and everywhere the tongue touched was left a thin sizzling streak of glowing embers. My boots were crisscrossed by fiery marks of obeisance. The spiney stretched its arms wide, feet long to the south, face down in the grime of the floorplates: it offered itself to me, drooling fire and sweating oil from the glands along its back. The oil probably protected it from its own flaming mucus, but nobody was there to protect me from my new servant. Not even Arlene. "Ssssslave," hissed the spiney. "No, you're not anybody's slave--" "Masssster!" I ground my teeth. There was something fundamen- tally wrong about this conversion. This wasn't how it was supposed to go! The spiney was supposed to wake up and take charge of its own life, not pick me to be its God instead of the Freds! Still, I had to play the hand I was dealt. "Look what the false ones did to you!" I trumpeted. "They left you here to be hurt and set you against--against your true master!" "Falssse onesss!" "They turned you against me, and now they must pay! Death--death to the false ones!" "Death to falssse onesss!" "That is our mission, our holy mission--destroy the false ones!" "Misssion dessstroy falssse onesss!" I winced and made a mental note: Try not to use so many S's around spineys! "And the second--and the other thing to do is find the other mistress, Arlene." "Find missstressss." "But, Christ, where is she?" I wondered out loud. In the first reality, I found her only after jumping from the first site of destruction on Phobos through the Moloch gate to Deimos. We found each other, both naked and trembling, in a room with an inverted cross stamped out of red-hot metal. But if she had any brains, and no one's ever accused Arlene Sanders of being stooopid, she would stay put where she found herself and wait for me to find her, too. Well . . . if she could stay put; circumstances might make it tight. "Get up, slave," I said. I decided to play the game to the hilt, if that was what the spiney needed. But I couldn't shake the uneasy feeling that maybe the Newbies programmed the monsters to be gullible, susceptible to my conversion--like Ninepin, this one seemed awfully easy to convert! Maybe that's exactly what the Newbies wanted to study. Was I giving away intel to the enemy? Hell, what else could I do? Couldn't bloody well fight them if'n I died in the simulation, could I? The spiney rose, towering over me, but I lowered my Sig-Cow anyway. If it wanted to jump me, it would always have opportunity; just then, I chose to assert my authority by force of will alone. "Tell me your name." "Sssslink," she answered; from that moment, Slink was a female to me. "Sssslink Sssslunk." "Slink Slunk. You're my first convert, the first apostle. We're going to have to gather an army, since I left mine behind in, um, heaven." "Sssslink learn power ssssoon?" Power? She must have meant the power to affect the "reality" of the simulation. "Sure, kid, soon. Now lead us downward. I want to get this crap squared away. Step one: we've got to find Arlene ... the other person like me, the other living human. Can you smell us?" "Sssslink can ssssmell," she confirmed. Slink stared around the room suspiciously, still tasting the air with her snaky tongue. She didn't seem to trust it, sipping it like fine wine, as if it bore scents warning her of dangers lurking below us. "Smell her out, Slink. Find my lance. But along the way, you're going to have to work with me to convert as many others of your kind to our cause as we can. Got that? No fighting or killing unless absolutely necessary." "Ssslink undersssstandsss." I started to ignore the hissing, which was probably caused by her forked yellow tongue. I remembered where the ladder was that led down to the next level, and I remembered a stadium full of zombies with rifles and shotguns, and more spineys who might not be as accommodating, between us and the ultimate level of Phobos, deep below. I remembered what waited down there: a pair of hell princes. I was not happy about facing them again. We continued through the acid room to a long corridor, and there we, as a pair, met our first hosts of the undead. Three zombie girls shambled forward, one of them topless and missing an arm, the other two UAC workers--all armed with weapons stolen from Fox Company Marines who didn't need them any- more. Slink held up her hands. "Sstop!" she com- manded. The zombies paused, obediently. Damn, that's right, I thought. The spineys have some sort of mental control over the zombies. "Thiss not real. Massterss dead. Join forcess, kill Newbiess!" The conversion was not a big hit among the zombie gallery. Maybe the original spineys had psychic con- trol over the reworked humans, but evidently when Slink converted to my cause and accepted the unreali- ty of her world--mostly because of my demonstra- tion, I realized, not by faith--she lost her ability to tap into the Psychic Freds Network. The damned zombies just wouldn't listen to her! The one-armed topless girl raised her hand. She held a five-shot revolver--nothing serious unless she got truly lucky with a shot. But I wasn't about to wait for her to start plinking. Before she could squeeze off a round, I pointed my rifle and fired one shot from the hip. At that range, if I'd have missed, I would have turned in my Marine Corps T-shirt. I took her amid- ships, sinking her in her own wake. There was a time when I would've felt disgust and revulsion against myself for shooting a woman. I longed for such a time; now I felt only grim joy at having cut down another undead monster. The other two zombies opened fire, unperturbed by their companion's obliteration. I dropped behind an ornate rosewood trellis left over from when this section of the UAC facility was a visitor's center. Fortunately, these undead were proving to be just as bad a pair of marksmen as the ones in real life; it probably had a lot to do with the fact that they never blinked, and their eyes were perpetually so dry they could barely see. I dropped to my butt to steady the rifle--couldn't expect too many bursts of luck firing from the hip-- and fired a round into the farthest of the two (she had the better weapon, some sort of bolt-action rifle; the other had a shotgun and was too far for it to be effective). If I had any doubts about my new convert, I buried them; she hocked and spat into her hand, then hurled the flaming ball of snot into the face of the shotgun-toting zombie-gal. The shotgunner screamed a combination of pain and rage and started firing her shotgun in our direc- tion. A few of the pellets struck me and burned like hell, since I wasn't wearing armor yet. I don't find it until the next level down, I remembered. But I stuck to my plan and pumped three more rounds into the rifle- gal until she finally dropped before turning my atten- tion to the shotgun zombie. By then, she was dead, burned into a blackened corpse by Slink Slunk, my first apostle. When the battle abruptly ended, I sat still for a long time, head bowed. God, I prayed, can You really make me go through all this again? I took a deep breath and stood, a Marine again. "All right, if that's what has to be, then it has to be." But what would happen in the Resuscitator simulation if I died? Damned good question: can a spirit that's nothing more than bits in a huge computer go to heaven? Or would my death mean my absolute obliteration? "Screw it," I muttered. Marines are riflemen first and philosophers never. "Come on, Slink, let's get the hell out of Dodge." I led her through the long corridor between the trellises to the door that led to the ladderway down. The next level was Godawful, as I recalled: a black- dark maze, spineys galore, and maybe even the first pinkie--the horrible demons who were all mouth, bigger even than the mouth of doddering old Mick Jagger; he was threatening a comeback tour when Arlene and I upshipped from Earth, six months and three hundred and fifty years ago.... I wondered if he still was? I won't go into every freaking battle of every freaking level; if I could believe Overcaptain Tokug- havita, it's already been thoroughly documented, and everybody who might be interested has already read about it in school. It was the same game, the same terrain, but this time, I gathered converts like a snowball. It was never the majority opinion. Slink and I were pretty soon joined by four other spineys (Whack, Sniff, Chomp, and Swaller), a pumpkin named Olestradamus, and even, God help us, a zombie that used to be Pfc. Dodd, the man that Arlene once sacked out with for a few months. In the previous version of reality, we ran into Dodd on Deimos, not Phobos, so I knew my abused brain was playing games with memory. The architecture was even more movable than before, since now it needed only the whirr of comput- er software, not hydraulics, to slide walls up and down, to open floors beneath our feet, even to shift entire sections of the UAC facility from one side to the other. My goal remained the same as before: find Arlene! But now I had a different plan once I found her. Somehow, we had to find a way for the ghosts to break out of the machine. I swear to Almighty God, I promised, that I will not die in software limbo; I'll jack my way out of this place, me and Arlene, and get my ass back to the real world! The only question was whether I'd manage to do it before the Newbies "fixed" the entire human race. Slink, the other apostles, and I lived on medikits and snarling blue spheres; I ate the food thoughtfully left behind by the UAC workers and my own com- rades of Fox Company when they gave up the ghost; I didn't want to think about what my followers ate. The only real advantage to being back where it all began-- in simulation, at least--is that I didn't have to worry about amino acids and vitamins and whether or not Fred food or Newbie food was edible by humans; I didn't have to monkey with food-supplement pills, purify water, or eat lumps of so-called "food" that looked like overgrown escapees from a box of Lucky Charms. Blue squares! Orange squares! Pink dodeca- hedrons! When we climbed down to the third level, what felt like half a day after I first appeared for the second time at the mouth of the overrun facility, we were greeted by a welcoming committee of five spineys, several zombies, and even one of those spectral ghosts that sounded (and smelled) so much like pinkies, even though we couldn't see them. I finally had my biggest question answered: how in the world, in this world, would Slink and Chomp and my other spiney con- verts fight against others of their kind? So far as I could tell, their flaming snotballs had no effect on each other due to the oily and obviously flame- retardant secretions from the glands along their backs and chests. We dropped heavily from the ladder into a whole frigging pool of the toxic goo, and I actually felt it eat quickly through my boots and start in on my feet. I ran like hell across the mess--right into the waiting embrace of the defenders of the faithless. I fell back against the wall, firing off shot after shot from an over-and-under I had liberated from ex- Corporal Magett. When the last shell was exhausted, I dropped the shotgun and unslung my Sig-Cow. I couldn't see my buddies. I thought sure as hell I was going to renege on my promise to the Almighty about not dying in this limbo. Four spineys--I had killed the fifth--swarmed me, and I took three flaming mucus balls to my face; my skin felt like it was parboiled off'n me, and I couldn't see for crap. I raised the rifle and fired blindly, wishing I could cry--apologizing over and over, under and under my breath, to Arlene--another Fly failure! Then one of the huge brown monkeys screamed in agony and whirled to face its attacker. It was Pfc. Dodd, Arlene's ex, screaming in his unmistakable high-pitched voice, unchanged even af- ter reworking; he shot it again with his own Sig-Cow. I forced my eyes open a bit wider to aim a round and planted it deep into the spiney's brainpan. Two down, three to rip me to pieces. But suddenly the other three spineys came under assault from a rain of huge sharp stones! I dropped to my ass to avoid the bombardment--it was a veritable intifada of my spiney apostles! I guess they figured out that their snotballs wouldn't do anything to their heathen brethren ... so they started ripping chunks of masonry out of the walls and using that as a weapon! God, faith was already working miracles on the spineys' thought processes. They drove their enemies back and back, killing two of them. One was knocked silly, and we later converted him--he's the spiney who called himself Swaller. When they were all dead, fled, or better bred, Slink and Chomp, who were starting to become an item, hunted up a blue sphere for me. They cradled it carefully on a piece of plastic camouflage netting they stole from a dead Marine's helmet and smooshed it into my face, thank Christ. I went from zero to sixty in 1.2 seconds, and I actually felt human and alive again. Meanwhile, Whack and Sniff rounded up all the unexpended rounds of ammo they could scrounge. Days passed--it sure seemed like days, but maybe it was "really" only a few microseconds--and I was already in the habit of drawing a huge question mark over any time indicator and writing subjective time! beneath it, ever since Arlene and I started flitting around the galaxy at nearly the speed of light. This was just another example of relativity, I reckoned. But it seemed like days to us, and that's all I can say: days passed, and we were finally ready for the last descent into the final horrific level on Phobos. We were about to come face to face with our first hell princes--and the gates of Moloch that led to a whole new limbo on Deimos. I hesitated at the top of the long, long ladder that led down nearly a kilometer into the crust of that tiny moon Phobos. Phobos means fear, I remembered, though I didn't know what the significance was. "Okay, boys and girls," I said. "Are we ready to rock 'n' roll?" They nodded. Swallowing hard, wondering where in this world I would find Arlene Sanders, I put a foot and hand on the ladder and began the long descent into blackness. Below me I heard an inhuman scream that still, after all and everything, caused my stomach to contract and my sphincter to clench. I recognized that scream. 16 We 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 shuf- fling 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 ele- phants. 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 infa- mous crack where I'd seen Arlene's skull and cross- bones 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 pla- toon. 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 stand- ing." "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 con- verted 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 connec- tion, 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, Cap- tain." 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 eve