le. They had been worshiping. Out of the smoke and flame strode a hell-prince ... and it was as mad as its name. It burst through the wreckage, throwing pieces of demon and chunks of masonry in all directions, a state-of-the-art minotaur with one hell of a 'tude. The hell-prince roared defiance and began firing dead- ly bolts at us from its wrist launchers. 22 . Run!" I shouted as I started loading the rocket launcher. She wasn't listening. Her AB-10 was rattling off hundreds of shots that harmlessly bounced off the hel- lion. Our only chance was the rocket launcher. I fired off the first two rockets as I was dancing backward; the force knocked me into Arlene and sent us both sprawling. The AB-10 skidded across the floor, and Arlene went after it on hands and knees. An energy bolt flashed between us, searing my eyeballs for a moment. I didn't care if I could see, so long as I could feel the smooth, metal surfaces of the little D-cell rockets and finish reloading. Just as I finished loading, my vision cleared; the eight-foot hell-prince bore down upon us, surrounded by smoke and stinking of brimstone. I'd promised myself never, ever to fire off rockets this close to the target! But a good look at that green gorgon face with the ram's horns was all I needed to reassess my position. I squeezed. The third and fourth direct hits slowed the behemoth to a confused crawl; but still it stood. I could see again--but now I couldn't hear. Loading, fingers numb, I didn't bother getting back to my feet; I fired from where I lay. I slid past Arlene, who had picked up her machine pistol and was aiming it. She shielded her eyes and hugged the ground as rockets five and six pounded the same tough chest that had withstood the previous four. I closed my eyes while sliding; the force of the sound took me like a physical wave, carrying me down the hall. The weight of Mars pressed on my eardrums as I rose groggily to my feet to reload the launcher. The Prince of Hell stood stock-still, eyeing me with a doleful expres- sion. I aimed and prepared to fire; but the monster made a loud, wheezing sound--a sigh?--and tumbled over, stiff as a statue, to impact directly on its face. "What in God's name was that?" Arlene gasped, still shaking. "No naming game for this baby," I said. "Already has a name. You're looking at the same model of Hell Prince you dodged when you slipped through the crack on Phobos, before the Gate. This is what was tramping down the corridor while you scrawled a skull and C- bones on the wall." She shook her head, clearing alien cobwebs and ap- pearing truly weary for the first time. "Boy, if the light had been better, you'd have been on your own, Fly, 'cause I sure as hell wouldn't have wasted two seconds making a mark with that mother staring me in the face." "Oh yes you would have." "Egomaniac." We needed all the cheering we could give each other. Picking through the carcasses, it seemed unfair that our only reward would be more ooze exactly where we needed to go. "Damn," said Arlene, "the whole place looks flooded." "You came up with the jogging theory," I reminded her. "Let's find out how good it is." I shouldn't have said anything, for then she insisted on going first, running through the middle of the toxin. I followed close behind, feeling the pain right through my soles. We didn't quite manage to jog, but we did keep up a brisk walk. The toxin slowed us down with a sucking, gripping quality; each second made me feel like it had been too long since my last checkup. I kept wishing for another of those crazy blue spheres to show up: I was beginning to wonder if I'd imagined the first. All bad things come to an end. We finally made it around the facility to the other elevator in Sector 9, not ten feet from where we'd started, if only we'd been able to shove through the flesh-ivy. I was beginning to hate the ooze more than I did the monsters . . . except when it was in barrels. The lift was the antique kind with a lever to start and stop, rather than buttons. We had a hell of a time trying to get it to stop at the next level down. The level started with a teleporter; not a good sign, far as I was concerned. "My turn to go first," I said; Arlene didn't argue. By the time she arrived, thirty seconds later, I was back at work. I'd killed three imps and five former soldiers/ workers, a more dim-witted than usual zombie collec- tion. "My turn to rescue you," she said; but this was duck soup after the hell-prince. Heck, most of the zombies weren't even armed! "We're getting good at this," I said. "Don't get cocky," she warned. I let it pass without remark. A platform lowered as we approached, as if inviting us into the parlor; still feeling cocky despite Arlene's warn- ing, I stepped aboard. Arlene followed, of course. At the top, I took a turn and came face to face with another hell-prince, holding a blue key card in its claws! "Get it--get it!" Arlene shouted; I didn't know wheth- er she meant the card or the monster ... but in either case, I had only four rockets left, not enough! I jerked up the launcher, then paused, staring. Some- thing was weird. Then I realized: we were nose-to-snout, and the thing hadn't screamed yet. Or moved. I edged closer ... It was frozen solid, like it had seen a gorgon from Greek mythology. Turned to stone. Heart pounding like a pile driver, I stepped close and gently plucked the blue key card from its claw. Then I rejoined Arlene on the floor, still shaking. Toxic waste literally surrounded us, the dry space where we stood like an island. The light was good enough to see other raised machinery platforms making islands in this sea. Arlene found a pole of thin metal. She tapped around for shallow parts and traced a crossable path to the first "island"; then she repeated the process until we made it through the toxic goop and into blue-glowing corridor. At least the color of the corridor made me glad to have the blue key card. On cue, we ran into a blue-trimmed door at the end of the corridor. We crossed into a narrow corridor with red-glowing walls, floor, and ceiling, so bright that it hurt our eyes. We heard a familiar thud- thud at the end of the hall; it sounded like more flesh blocks. Variety is the spice of life, even on Deimos. The sounds came from a piece of stamping machinery that didn't seem to be the least bit organic. I was grateful for that. "Oh, great," said Arlene, "some jerk has tossed anoth- er key card onto the base." The implication was that we couldn't walk away from something so valuable as anoth- er computer key card. A giant, metal piston repeatedly smashed down to within a few centimeters of the base, stamping anything on the base into powder. "Arlene, why would anyone put the card out for us, except as bait? We don't need it." "We used the blue card to get this far," she insisted. "What's behind the mystery yellow door?" "But Arlene .. ." She was through listening. The only way to get the yellow key card was to slide across the base, grab it, and roll off the other side before the stamping part came down to turn the contestant into pate. She backed away, measuring the piston's rise and fall with her eyes. I was about to stop her and tell her about the patented Fly technique for opening doors; then I remembered my meager supply of rockets. "At least let me do that," I said. "You? Corporal Two-left-feet on the drill field?" I opened my mouth to angrily protest; then I realized she was right--understating it, if anything. I never could get the timing right on anything more complicated than dress-right-dress or point-and-shoot. My heart in my mouth, I watched Arlene count, timing the piston. Then quickly, before she could think better of it or I could object again, she jumped just as it hit the low point and started to rise again. Arlene sprinted across the room and threw herself into a face-first baseball slide, scooping the key card in her arms. She slid to a halt... but she was still on the base! For an instant she froze. I couldn't possibly reach her in time--and a horrible image flashed through my mind. If Arlene died, in the next cycle, I knew I would jump on the machine and die alongside her. Thank God I didn't have to make that decision; at the last second she made a panic roll off the platform. Arlene left the key card on the stamper, near the edge; but it was a simple matter, when the piston rose, to scoop it off from where she stood. She pocketed it... and good thing; past the stamping machine was a thick airlock door, tough as a bank vault, surrounded by yellow lights. I doubt a rocket would even have scratched the chrome. Maybe a SAM. The yellow key card let us into a central, circular corridor surrounding a giant, cylindrical room. We took a lift down into the room; once inside, the lift moved up again. "Uh, Fly, I don't see any switch to bring it back down." Damned if she wasn't right. From inside, the lift door looked like a spine with ribs coming out of it. Once again, no human would ever have made anything like this. The aliens were definitely re- working Deimos, and had been for some time. "I don't like their interior decorator," she said, as if reading my mind. She tilted her head in the direction of the latest attraction. A row of what looked like red spittoons stretched out of sight, and on each one there was a skull bathed in red light. "If these were human minds, I'd say they were psy- chotic," I commented. "You know something, Fly? Every monster we've seen has a head too large or strangely shaped to be mistaken for a human head." "Yes." "Then how do you account for the skulls? Whether they're designs on walls or ceilings or whole skulls like these, they're all human." "And they couldn't have been taken from us, not all of them; with all the zombies and unbeheaded corpses, who'd be left?" She touched one. "This isn't real," she said. "More like metal than bone." I turned it over, looking at it from different angles. "I'll bet it's meant to scare us, same as the freakin' swastika. Well, we're past being bothered by Halloween." I instantly regretted my choice of words. No sooner would I toss a challenge into the air than it would be answered. Was someone watching our every move? This time it was a horde of imps, zombies, and a couple of pumpkins coming around the curve of the room, screaming doom in our ears. Fortunately, they were only coming at us from the one direction. We would have had no chance if attacked from both directions. Arlene dropped flat, and I let fly with my last rockets. I ignored the imps, concentrating on the two pumpkins, the greater threat. Somebody got careless on the other side, and soon all the monsters were mixing it up among themselves. We drew back around the curve and waited for silence; then we slid back and smoked the survivors with shotgun and AB-10. I still had one last rocket. In the course of the fight, somebody--us or them-- accidentally activated a switch in the floor that caused part of a staircase to rise. When the last pumpkin smashed into orange and blue slime against the ruined head of the last assassinated imp, we started up the steps. Arlene activated the next switch. Another set of steps rose, and we took them to the third switch and set of stairs. At the top we found a teleporter. We stepped aboard one at a time, me first, teleporting to a long corridor with barred windows looking outside. Arlene bent over for a closer view and pulled back with a gasp. "Let me guess," I said. "You didn't see the stars or Mars." Swallowing hard, she motioned for me to look for myself. She wasn't in the mood for humor. Blood had drained from her face, a reaction I'd never before seen in Arlene. I put my face against the window. As a child, I'd seen a painting in a museum that gave me my first nightmare. I hadn't thought of it in years; but now it came back to me. Beyond the window was a river of human faces, hundreds of them, each an island in an ocean of flesh. Each face had a horrified expression stamped on it, each a damned soul. The spectacle achieved its purpose. We were both distracted. Otherwise we wouldn't have been so careless as to allow a stomping, single-minded demon to get close enough to clamp its jaws on Arlene's back and shoulder. Her cries were echoed by each face in the river of damned souls, each screaming Arlene's pain and tor- ment. 23 Arlene!" I shouted. I grabbed the monster with my hands and literally pulled it off her before it could position itself to take a second and certainly lethal bite. It stumbled clumsily. I grabbed the AB-10 and pumped two dozen rounds into its open, blood-caked maw. It didn't get up. I was almost afraid to touch her. Blood pumped out of the horrible, fatal wound. Arlene was dying. Her face was sallow, eyes vacant and staring. One pupil was dilated, the other contracted to a pinpoint. There was nothing I could do, not even with a full medical lab. But damn her, she was not going to die here and join that river of faces. As gently as I could, I lifted Arlene's bleeding body in my arms and carried her out of that circle of hell. Her rasping breath was a call to arms, a signal that life and hope still remained in the young gal. I set her down at the end of the corridor; the lift door was blocked by a river of what appeared to be lava. Hoping the red stuff was at least no worse than the green stuff, I dashed across into an alcove where a single switch mocked me. I flipped it, causing a path to rise up through the "lava." So far, so good. I ran back, grabbed Arlene, and walked across the path as quickly as possible. At the last step before reaching the lift, I heard a grinding noise from behind. I paused and looked back: a new path rose slowly, leading to an alcove hidden from view except from where I now stood. The cubbyhole contained another one of the blue-face spheres that I thought I'd never see again, the one item that I had hesitated to tell Arlene about because it seemed so incredible. The sight was like another of the adrenaline bursts. Quickly, before the path could lower again, I powered her across, not bothering to stop and pick up pieces of equipment that fell from us, some landing on the path, some lost in the lava. I had a great terror that the sphere would fly away just before I got there, like a carnival balloon just out of reach. I reached it, hesitated for a moment--then literally threw Arlene onto the sphere to make sure I wouldn't be the one to touch it first. With a nearly audible silent pop, the blue liquid was all over her; and the red liquid on her body, the blood, evaporated into the blue. Arlene sat up and coughed, looking like someone coming out of a deep sleep. "How do you feel?" "My shoulder hurts like a son of a bitch. What the hell happened?" "Pinkie decided to have you for a midnight snack. I put him on a diet. You sure you're all right?" Standing up, she shook her arm, staring in wonder at the shredded sleeve and tooth marks. "What in God's name did you do to me?" I figured the time had finally come to tell her about the • magical blue spheres. She had no trouble believing me. Only my pistol and some shotgun shells had been lost to the lava. Weapons in hand, we slid into the elevator and pressed the only floor button, labeled Command Center. The lift had barely begun to grind slowly downward when suddenly Arlene reached past me and pushed the red "kill" button. The elevator stopped, falling silent. "Why did you kill the power?" She stared at me before answering. For a moment I had a terrible fear that something had gone wrong with the blue sphere and she was going to turn into a zombie in front of me. Instead she asked, "Fly, are you starving, or is it just me?" I shook my head. She continued: "Maybe it's that blue thing, but I'm so famished I could swallow one of those pink demons." "How about floating pumpkin pie for dessert?" "And I'm suddenly exhausted. Fly, I need some sleep." I had completely lost track of the supplies. Arlene hadn't. "Don't you ever listen to training videos? Never wander into battle without MREs." She demonstrated the truth of her maxim. Suddenly, I realized I was hungrier than I thought. A Meal Ready to Eat sounded like the finest, gourmet cuisine in the solar system. "A stopped elevator as a secure base. I never would've thought of it." "Next best thing to a Holiday Inn," she added, raising an eyebrow. Arlene showed a domestic side that sur- prised me. While we talked, she took the packages of freeze-dried food and mixed them in the water of her canteen. "Sorry it'll be cold," she said as I watched her shake the contents with the skill of a bartender preparing the perfect martini. "That's all right, beautiful. I like cold--" I picked up the package, glanced at the title. "--cold beef stew." I also liked the fact that Arlene was alive. As we chowed down, I felt the strongest emotions since finding her on Deimos. Maybe she sensed the inappropriate feelings coming off me in waves. She lowered her head and blinked rapidly, as if stopping herself from crying by main force. "What's wrong?" I asked. "Don't want to tell you." "Why not?" She hesitated. "Willy," she said. "PFC Dodd." "Oh." I squirmed uncomfortably. "I've been forcing myself not to think about him. He's dead, isn't he? Or ... worse." "You don't know that! I thought you were dead or reworked, but I found you alive." "Find anybody else?" I didn't say anything. "Fly, I've accepted the fact. That he's dead, I mean. I don't think I could face--the other possibility." She looked up, her eyes moist but not tearing. "Promise me something." "Anything possible." "If we find him and he is, you know . . . and if I can't do it... will you? Promise? And don't mention him again." I nodded, not trusting myself to speak. Funny lump in my throat. Yeah, babe; I'll be happy to blow away my rival for your hand if he should happen to turn up a zombie. No problemo! She changed the subject, wrenching my mind back on the primary issue. "Fly, I think it's pretty likely that the aliens we're fighting aren't the same ones who built the Gates." "I was wondering about that myself," I said. "All this weird stuff, skulls and satanic symbols--there was noth- ing about the Gates themselves that hinted at this. The Gates don't look like a Vincent Price movie." "There's nothing eldritch about the Gates," she said. I was starting to like that word. "So let's assume these aliens found the Gates and discovered a way to turn them on from the other end. But why do they look so much like human-style demons?" "Genetic engineering?" I suggested. "They could be deliberately designed to look like our conception of hell, particularly the hell-princes. They're the dead give- aways." "Can't you find some other word than dead?" she begged, a fleck of red tomato paste on her lips. "The hell-princes are just too much like medieval drawings of the devil to be natural." "Unless they really are hell-princes," Arlene said. ! shook my head, unwilling to consider that possibility. So we sat in silence for a moment, finishing our food and drink. Much more thinking along these lines and I'd be ready to take communion again. "I was never really afraid of monsters as a child," Arlene finally said. "Grown-ups were scary enough by themselves." "Why invade at all? What is this for?" "Good question," she said. "Here's another: If they can genetically engineer imps and demons, why do they need human zombie-slaves? And why grow human flesh?" "Maybe they want super-zombies, more powerful than these dead excuses for lemmings, but still able to pass among us undetected." Arlene yawned, struggling to show enthusiasm. "But that may be their weakness, Fly. The zombies don't amount to much. You and I aren't scared by skulls and evil symbols. What if there is a finite number of the actual monsters and they can't easily recreate them? What if the monsters too are 'reworked' from other creatures, creatures the mastermind has to breed and raise? That would mean every horrible creature we kill is one fewer to invade Earth if they can't be replaced. Until the new, improved pod-people come on-line." I liked it. "Arlene, if you're right, all we have to do is kill everything . . . and we end the invasion." We didn't have anything for dessert, so we used imagination to sweeten the conversation. "I've been thinking about the idea they're using Deimos as a spaceship," I said. "How can you move something as large as a whole moon?" "I was thinking some sort of hyperspace tunnel. Yeah, I know; I've been reading too much sci-fi, Fly." I didn't say it. At least it was something, a hypothesis. "Maybe there's some way to break through the tunnel walls?" I asked. "Maybe. But it could also kill us. We don't know if 'outside the walls' has the same physical laws; and even if it does, if there's even any air." "It could also disrupt what's happening, maybe de- stroy Deimos and everything on it." "Including us? But that would throw a monkey wrench in their invasion plans," she said with a smile that turned into a yawn. She wasn't bored. Her eyelids were heavy from exhaustion. "If these creatures run the moon--the ship," I said, "then what horrors guard the tunnel wall?" "Those faces couldn't be real, could they? I hated those faces . . ." Her head nodded forward and she snored. It wasn't a very loud snore. The elevator was as secure a place as we were likely to find. I sat watch and let her sleep. There was an eerie silence despite the faint vibration. After four hours I woke her up. "Your turn," she insisted, rubbing pieces of sleep from her eyes. "Don't let me sleep more than three hours." "Fly, sleep! I command you to sleep," she said, making hypnotic passes. I slept. . . not because of the mystic passes, but because of a mud slogger's ability to sleep anywhere. I could have done without the dreams. The river of faces touched something deep in both of us, the place where you store up all your fears and regrets. Going to sleep meant sinking right into that place. I was tangled in long, sticky fibers like a giant spiderweb, but at the center of the web was a face made of a hundred different faces. I didn't want to look at it; but the face came closer, slowly rotating like a planet, showing different faces spread across its surface, smiles melting into frowns, rows of eyes like so many beads of glass, noses creating an uneven mountain range stretch- ing to the horizon. Then the sphere of blue faces was pressed right against mine, and it had stopped turning. In the center was the face of my long dead grandfather as I had seen him in the open casket. His toothless mouth was working, lips twisting, but no sounds came out. I knew what he was saying, though: "Dinna let them rework me, Fianna Flynn, me lad . . . dinna never let them rework us all, b'Gad." The sticky fibers became tendrils sliding up my nose and into my mouth, choking me. The truth is out there . . . I woke up in a cold sweat. Arlene was shaking me hard. "Fly, are you okay?" "Sleep is overrated," I gasped. I was just as tired as when I'd put my head down. Standing, I felt dizzy. Probably running a fever, but I didn't want to mention it. There was nothing to be done anyway. I pushed the button back in to reactivate the power; then I pushed the floor button, and the elevator continued its trip to the Command Center. It was a good thing we'd eaten and tried to get some rest. The moment the doors opened, we were in another damned firefight with zombies, imps, pumpkins, and a specter. The ambush trapped us in the lift. We used the lift doors for cover. By the time we worked our way out, we'd cleaned a huge room with stairways at either end, leading up to a split-level. There were six pillars; each had its designated nasty hiding behind it. Pushing through a door at the top of the split-level, we found a gigantic indoor garden or arboretum. The air was thick with pollen from a jungle of fleshy plants overgrowing where some breed of computers used to be. Arlene sneezed repeatedly. I lucked out. I was so exhausted that maybe I wasn't breathing as deeply. "You can say one thing for the greenhouse," I observed. "Plants are plants here, and not combined with ma- chines." Blowing her nose--allergies--Arlene added: "And men are men, and so are the women." All that was missing was a handsome horse and blazing six-guns. The absence of monsters was reason enough to ex- plore. We could breathe later. The primary motif seemed to be a blackish, oily wood that sure as hell never originated on the old home planet. Periodically, the wood bubbled and popped, like ulcerated sores in what- ever monstrous trees had produced it. I imagined a three-headed Paul Bunyan with ax-handle hands cutting the planks. The ground squished underfoot as we walked; I looked closely and saw incredibly long, wafer-thin insects scoot- ing out from under our feet. We finally reached the end of the arboretum and the vegetation ran out against puke- green marble, just as we'd seen back in the warehouse. "Will you look at that?" said Arlene, pointing at red-orange curtains of fire crackling beyond the high walls, at a sufficient distance that we weren't roasting. "Now that's bad taste," I said. "Next they'll have Lieutenant Weems in a red devil suit pop out of a cake." "Complete with pointy tail?" she asked wryly. "You have a twisted mind, PFC Sanders." The better to explore with, I added mentally. I hoped this situation wasn't like those science fiction stories where the terrifying menaces are taken telepathically from the greatest fears of the human beings involved. My worst fears couldn't be this corny! Arlene found a switch that opened a hidden room; we went with the flow. Entering the chamber, we marveled at how different it was from what we'd seen before. The entire room was constructed of that black, oily, ulcerat- ing wood. There was one object in the room, placed at dead center: a bas relief of a demonic monster more horrible, or more ridiculous, than any we'd fought. Every physical attribute of the thing was exaggerated so that it almost seemed to be a cartoon. The largest protuberance of all was its penis, sticking out at a 45-degree angle. "They've got to be kidding," said Arlene. "I hate to bring it up, but that's probably another switch," I suggested. "I've handled worse," she admitted. 24 As she flipped the switch, we heard familiar heavy, grinding sounds outside in the marble chamber. Being nearer the door, I took a look-see. I wasn't the least bit surprised to see a set of stairs rising up in the marble room leading straight up to one of the walls of fire. Arlene joined me in pondering this new development. Neither of us seemed to be in a great hurry to run up those stairs. "Do you feel fireproof?" she asked me. "I left my asbestos pajamas back on Earth." "Maybe there's an opening we can't see from down here." "We can only dream," I sighed. I went first. She was close behind, though. As soon as it became too hot, I had every intention of stopping. I didn't feel any heat at all. Arlene noticed as well. "This isn't a bit like Campfire Girls," she said. "By now, all the marshmallows in my pocket should be screaming out: 'Put me on a stick!'" "You have marshmallows?" "No." "I don't think it's a real flame. Wait here, Arlene. If I catch on fire or die of heat stroke, you'll know there was something wrong with my theory." Another ten steps up the stairs convinced me that I was definitely on to something. Ten more steps and I was becoming certain. I still wasn't hot as I walked right up to the curtain of seething flame and very slowly put my hand out. The hand went right through the fire, disappearing from view without causing Yours Truly the least discom- fort. I didn't even get a blister. "Arlene," I called out, "the fire is an illusion. Come on up." I walked right through, then turned around where the fire should be ... and there was nothing there but the welcome sight of Arlene coming up the stairs. "Arlene, can you see me?" I asked. "No," she answered, staring right at me. "You've disappeared behind the fire." "For my next illusion," I announced with my best stage magician's voice, and stepped back through where the curtain had to be, "I pull something cool out of my hat." "Like a beer?" she asked, taking the last steps two at a time so we stood on the same level. "No beer, but I do have a surprise." She was curious, and I bent from the waist, gesturing through the curtain. She preceded me to the big surprise. "Oh, no," she said, "not another teleporter." We were both pretty worn-down by this point, but a new teleporter meant we had to make a decision. What we needed was a map to show us the location of all the frying pans and fires. "So should we bother with this one or not?" She sighed. "We'd better try it, Fly. We've got to find a way off this moon, and this is pretty carefully hidden away. Let's give it a shot, hon." "Who's first this time?" I asked. She hooked her arm in mine. "Let's do it together again." Weapons out, we stepped aboard. With a flash of light, we zapped to a huge room shaped like the spokes of a wagon wheel. Six hell-princes surrounded us. Six monstrous mouths opened. Six monstrous throats emitted guttural screams. Twelve angry, red eyes burned at us in the dim light. The hell-princes were not the only ones screaming. Arlene and I screamed, too. This was a sight to make anyone howl at the moon. As the green fireballs began exploding all around us, we simply lost it--running around like chickens with their legs cut off, shooting wildly. There was nowhere to run, but we sure as hell tried! "Duck!" we shouted at each other at about the same time. The balls of energy made fireworks over our heads. Our gunfire was nothing more than a quiet popping in that chaos, mild raindrops, but we kept firing, me with my shotgun and Arlene with her AB-10. I found a door by pure, random chance. Praying for a miracle, I hollered for Arlene and yanked the door open . . . and now I was surrounded by a dozen floating pumpkins! Frying pans and fires--definitely frying pans and pumpkins. Arlene screamed something from the chamber with the hell-princes, but I couldn't hear her over my own screaming. This situation was fast becoming unaccepta- ble. There were too many pumpkins even to think about shooting; death, doom, and destruction from all direc- tions! I ran as fast as I could . . . right back into the room with the hell-princes. I wasn't thinking very clearly, but Arlene still had her head screwed on. Her hand snaked out and grabbed me. She'd stepped inside another of the spoke-chambers and now hauled me inside with her. I imagined wall-to-wall demons waiting for us, zombies stacked like cordwood to the ceiling, imp tartare .. . but inside, for the moment, was nothing but Arlene and Yours Truly. She held a finger against her lips; I braced myself for the Bad Guys to come after us and imagined the absolute worst. A tidal wave of sound crashed on us--roaring, screaming, crashing. But all that came through that doorway was sound. The pumpkins and the hell-princes collided in a torrent of blood and vengeance. There were so many monsters that they took a long time to die. At least fifteen minutes Arlene and I crouched in our little closet of safety as the pumpkins splattered themselves against the horned heads of the hell-princes. Blue balls of energy evaporated against lethal lightning bolts. Blood flowed thick on the floor. We stayed right where we were. Finally, there was beautiful silence. We heard each other's breathing. "Who goes first?" Arlene whispered. "What do you mean?" "Who takes a peek?" I raised my hand as if I were back in grade school. Cautiously I poked my head outside the star-pointed hideaway. A single hell-prince remained on its feet. I pulled back inside our hideaway and reported. "Then why isn't he at the doorway threatening to rip our lungs out?" I looked past her. The hell-prince loomed in the doorway, waiting to ... It looked like yesterday's lunch today. Arlene saw my face, followed my eyes and saw it. I grabbed for my rocket launcher, but it was gone from the webbing--dropped in panic in one of the two rooms, of course! Arlene pointed her AB-10. "That won't work," I shouted. A peashooter against the most powerful mon- ster we'd run into! Had she gone insane? She pulled the trigger three times, and thrice the hammer clicked on an empty chamber. She stared as the mauled, bloody beast staggered forward like Frankenstein's monster, clutching at her. Winding up like the Mud Hens' star pitcher, she heaved the gun into the minotaur's ugly face. Good God. I'm watching an old episode of Superman! I thought. It blinked. The horned head shook slowly back and forth, left to right, as if trying to remember something. Then it fell, straight as a toppling redwood, to the cold marble--dead. "And I didn't even know he was sick," said Arlene. We both burst into hysterical laughter--stress released. The floor was slippery with slick, tacky pumpkin juice, and we almost slipped several times. Clambering across the body of another hell-prince, Arlene pushed into the pumpkins' room and shouted, "You won't believe this!" "What?" I was hunting for my good pal, Mr. Launcher. "Get your butt in here! Um, please get your butt in here, Corporal." There it was! I snagged it and clambered after her. The light was flickering, but I could see well enough. Crucified on the walls were the mutilated bodies of four hell-princes, with spidery trails of dried blood extending from their hands--if those hams with claws on the end could be called hands. "Jesus, Mary, and Joseph! What the hell is going on here?" Blasphemy! chanted my memory-nuns. . . demons crucified in mockery of Our Lord. The hell-princes were killed a long time ago; the dried blood told us that much. We made a circuit of the chamber and found plastic spheres with cracks so that they could swing open or close as easily. All the spheres were empty. . . but they were just the size to hold pumpkins. "Pumpkin nests," said Arlene. I stared awhile longer at the four crucified bodies of the minotaurs. "My God, it must have been the damned pumpkins themselves put the princes up there! They must hate them worse than they do us." It was a religious revelation for both of us. "No wonder it's so easy to pit them against each other," said Arlene in awe. "They despise and loathe each other so much, they proudly display each other's ripped carcasses." She looked up at me, face lighting up. "Jesus, Fly, we have a chance to win!" I saw where she was headed. I had thought that the monster-aliens were simply so bad-tempered that when a zombie stumbled in the way of an imp fireball, or a demon took a bullet meant for one of us, they lost their concentration and turned on each other with mindless ferocity. But "mindless ferocity" didn't explain the cold, delib- erate crucifixion of hell-princes by pumpkins, did it? Such a contemplative act required a deep, abiding ani- mosity or hatred, and the single-minded determination to torture. Something, the "mastermind," held them together; but left to themselves, the natural inclination of each monster would be to hunt down all the other kinds and kill them. The thought certainly suggested our tactic: kill the damned mastermind, and let nature take her course! Now the only question was where in this hell that mastermind was. We continued searching the pumpkin room. We found it stuffed with ammo, everything from rockets to shells to rounds for Arlene's depleted AB-10; the various firefights had run us dry. After loading up, we pushed past one of the crucified hell-prince bodies and checked out the rest of the wagon wheel. Not a creature was stirring, not even a zombie. "Shall we teleport?" asked Arlene. "After what happened the last time we teleported?" "We going to spend the rest of our lives on this karmic wheel?" "Apres vous, Bodhisattva." We teleported together. Appearing on a platform in a metallic room, we saw a door with blue trim that sure as shootin' required a blue key card. Arlene went over and put her ear to it. "I hear what might be a lift operating; I guess we go thataway." "Key, key, who's got the key?" I asked. "Another typical day on the job. Teleport. Get a key. Open a door. Find a teleport." Arlene smiled. "I guess we're in a rut." 25 Nothing remarkable about this area, except one dark section that was just begging for a flashlight. I went up, cast a light, and saw twisty passages that suggested a maze. The light was curiously muted, dying out after only a few feet. "You want to poke in here?" I whispered; whispering seemed appropriate. "Um ... no. Maybe we don't need to; and I don't like the look of the place. It's dark--not that I'm afraid of the dark!" "Really? I sure am, especially recently. All right, it's pitch-black, it's a maze, and the ceilings are low and claustrophobic. Pass." I mean, why? Life is short, espe- cially on Deimos. I was still staring into the blackness when gunshots yanked my attention back to Arlene. I raced down the hall and saw her pumping slugs into tiny, emaciated demons, so small I almost didn't recognize them. "Look what I found!" she exclaimed, kicking the tiny bodies aside. Reaching behind their corpses, Arlene extracted a blue key card. Tiny demons? I wondered . . . were they mutants? Failed experiments? Or did demons shrink when they starved? Other possibilities were more disturbing: Were these child demons? Were demons born or hatched, or created whole somewhere? I shuddered; whatever they were, they gave me the creeps more than their gigantic counterparts. She sprang the door with the key card, and we went right through, smooth as you please . . . only to discover another door right behind it, this one requiring a yellow card! "Egah," I bellowed, and by God I meant it! An hour later we had traded a bunch of ammunition for a shiny, new, yellow key card. Don't ask. We shuffled back to the mystery door, and Arlene inserted the card. It slid. Revealing . . . Yet another door: red. "You know," I said, "there's only one section of this whole place we've avoided." "The dark, mazy thing we passed? Fly, we don't even know there's a key card in there, or that if there is, it's red." "Well... I shot a door open with a rocket once." "How many rockets we have?" "Now? Six." "How many does it take to kill a hell-prince?" "Usually six." Arlene sucked air through her teeth. "Ma