e we had spent the night in the same bunk, stripped to our skivvies; some people in Fox Company had never believed us that we never had sex--but it's true. I loved her too much to push for something that she would probably give me, even though she didn't want to, just out of friendship. But that never stopped us from cuddling up when crap got too scary, or when one of us was hurting from a failed affaire du coeur. We held each other tight the night before landing, Arlene's beautiful high-and-tight pressed hard against my blue-shaven chin, as Corps as we could possibly be for our last day--but still needing the warmth of that one human who made it all worthwhile, even the end. And believe it or not, we actually slept well: we had no doubts or nagging fears because we knew we were going out in a blaze of Marine Corps glory the next morning! Tomorrow came, and Fredworld loomed before us on the for'ard TV monitor. Assuming no color correc- tion, it was mostly brown with straight black lines crisscrossing it at odd angles, with no visible conti- nents, water, or weather, but tons of gunk orbiting around it, sparkling in the sunlight every now and again. Jagged red streaks might indicate intense vol- canic activity.... "Oh joy," I said when Arlene suggested the possibility. "We should stay on aboard the ship," said Sears and Roebuck, as if we had rehearsed anything but for the last eight weeks. "Strap down," I commanded. "The atmosphere is getting thick enough to measure. We might be in for some heavy buffeting, according to the timeline." The Fred computer was no liar. We were shaken around something fierce, and I got seasick almost immediately. I didn't blow, but I sure felt as green as Sears and Roebuck looked. Even Arlene wasn't com- fortable, and she never gets motion sick. We hadn't bothered to strap down the captain's body, and he was bounced right out of his chair. Oh well, I sure as hell wasn't about to unstrap to go fetch him. His corpse bucked around the bridge, dropping artichoke leaves in its wake as if leaving a trail for us to follow. I hoped he "felt" every blow, the worthless bastard, however dead aliens "feel" anything! All of a sudden, I heard God's own crash of trumpets and drums, and the ship wrenched so abruptly, so violently, that I think I passed out; I blinked back to awareness sometime later--don't know how long--and immediately felt a head- splitting agony, like some Fred or Fred monster was repeatedly jamming its claw into my skull! The sear- ing pain lasted only four or five seconds, then it was gone, but it was another few heartbeats before color rushed back into my vision. I hadn't even realized I was seeing in black and white until the view colorized again. Every muscle in my body ached, like two mornings after the world's toughest workout. My stomach lurched; we were at zero-g again. What the hell? 1 looked to my side, where I could just see a portal: the planet loomed below us, barely moving, drifting slowly up to greet us. I didn't hear the engines humming. Were we in freefall? What gave? Arlene and Sears and Roebuck started thrashing around, finally coming around to consciousness again. I had no idea what had happened or how we appeared to be landing without engines--the only ones who might have known were the Klave, and they weren't talking. Arlene started looking around, com- ing to the same conclusions I had a couple of minutes earlier; we looked questions at each other, then I shrugged and she narrowed her eyes. I didn't care, so long as we made dirtside--but Arlene would stew over how we had landed for days and days until she figured it out, unless Sears and Roebuck decided to get a whole hell of a lot more garrulous than they had been to date. Unless her serene contemplation were cut short by Fred rays and machine guns. For the moment, at least--a long moment--we ran silently and at peace, probably our last moment of calm before the firestorm of combat. Then, with a groaning thump that sounded as if the entire Fred ship were tearing in half along the major axis, we jerked to a stop on some sort of runway. We had arrived on Fredworld, shaken but not stirred. Quickly, I got my troops unstrapped, and we hus- tled along to our stations, just in case the Fred fooled us by cutting their way inside without waiting for the doors to open. Nothing happened, and we waited out the landing sequencer. Then, seventy-five minutes after landing and right on schedule, the cargo door began to roll open, excruciatingly slowly, making a noise like all the Fred monsters in the world scream- ing in unison. We braced for the impact of the first shock troops. We waited; we waited; nothing came; nothing pounded, rattled, or thumped up the gangway. We sat alone, each in our assigned spots, ready for action that never came, the war never fought. I held my breath as long as I could. Then, about fifteen after we should have seen the first swarms of Freds up the gangway, overrunning our first "defen- sive" position (designed to be overridden, I add), I clenched my teeth to activate my throat mike and clicked to Arlene: click, click-click, click, click . . . Marine code for "nothing this end how's by you?" The tiny lozenge-size receiver in my ear told me what I was afraid of hearing: click, click-click. Nothing her end, either. Sears and Roebuck didn't have a mike or receiver, but they were with Arlene. I waited another fifteen minutes, querying every two minutes; Arlene responded every time with the same combination: click, click-click. Or is it Arlene? I thought with sudden trepidation. I visualized the monsters overwhelming her before she could signal engagement or fire a shot, subduing her or even . . . killing her. Behind my eyes, I saw a scaly fungoid finger clicking on the mike, repeating the all-clear over and over. I gave with a rapid-fire series of clicks, running through nearly half the Marine Corps signal code. Almost immediately, my correspondent responded with the other half--either it was really Lance Corpo- ral Arlene Sanders or one hell of a smart Fred captain. My muscles started to cramp. I stood cautiously, keeping an ear cocked and an eye trained on the gangway. After stretching, I returned to my position: many an ambush has been blown by impatience. But after an hour of plenty of nothing, even my patience was exhausted. If I knew they were coming, just late, I could have waited a week! But more and more, it began to look like we'd been had. "End operation gather at final rendezvous spot," I clicked to my corporal. Ten minutes of quick walking later, we all met in the engine room. Arlene stared at me as if it were all my fault; she kept clenching and relaxing her gun hand, rubbing her fingers against her thumb like she were trying to start a fire the hard way. "Okay, buddy-boy Sergeant dude, what gives?" I shrugged. "There's no boarding party." "Gee, you think so?" If sarcasm could drip, I had just had a puddle of it dribbled onto my shoes. I scratched my chin; it was already starting to get rough. In another few hours, I'd have to shave again. Funny, I thought the last time was the last time I'd ever have to do that. "You, ah, want to recon?" Arlene turned to look back over her shoulder, as if she'd heard a noise. I didn't hear anything. "Recon?" "Yeah, recon: that's when you go outside and--" "I guess we'd better; we're never going to sleep again if we don't." I turned to Sears and Roebuck, but they were shaking so hard they were blurry. "We'll stay here," they said. "We'll be out right. We'll follow you in later time. We'll stay here until you come back. But we'll follow you in later time." I was a little shocked when I realized that they were speaking separately! I had never seen such a thing before among the Klave, never even knew it was physically possible! I guess that was their equivalent of multiple-personality disorder, or in this case, a feedback loop--they could neither advance nor fail to advance. I expected smoke to come out their ears at any moment, but they disappointed me. Arlene and I found the emergency engine-room access panel and laboriously hand-cranked it open, then we dropped lightly through, landing with a crunch on Fredworld. 3 As predicted by the timeline program, the ground and air were quite hot and very humid, but we didn't sink into lava or inhale a lungful of hydrogen cyanide. The ship, which evidently had no name, just a number, was so monstrous it looked like that shopping mall in Tucson--used to be in Tucson-- that advertised as the world's largest, until the Fred bomb. The beast that had carried us a couple hundred light-years hulked high above our heads, stretching on out of sight in a generally sunward direction, shield- ing us from the terrific heat. Sideways past the ship were a series of squarish buildings seemingly built on something soft that had collapsed; they all leaned, one way or another, at crazy angles like the Leaning Tower of Pisa. The whole arrangement looked like a demented version of an Earth spaceport. In the other direction was a monstrous condo complex erected roughly like a human graveyard, like headstones arranged in con- centric circles. The reddish sky added to the "charm" of Fredworld, its ground that glowed in spots, covered with eight centimeters of black ash. There was not a single artichoke-head to be seen. A spongy walkway encircled the ship's berth; we cau- tiously moved onto it, expecting the Fred to come screaming out of the buildings at any moment and fully prepared to instantly retreat to our defensive positions aboard the ship. For the next eleven hours we searched that damned compound--nearly two thirds of an eighteen-hour Fred day. We found sludge from decomposing leaves littering half the buildings; either they liked walking through sludge or a bunch of Fred were slain so suddenly that no one had time to sweep the place. But then, where were the corpses? "I'm getting a real bad feeling about this," I muttered to Arlene. She said nothing, just tugged on my body armor and pointed back at the ship: after eleven hours, Sears and Roebuck were finally poking their noses out, sniffing the winds to figure out why they were still alive. I was so beat, I didn't even go over and tell them. Let 'em figure it out on their own, I angrily decided! I'd been on my feet forever, and I wasn't in the mood to deal with them. Arlene was bad enough. As soon as it became obvious there were no Freds anywhere around--hence, probably very few Freds, if any, on the whole planet, else they would have stormed our ship, even if they had to send for troops--Arlene reslung her weapon-of-choice, a twelve-gauge, semi-auto riot gun made by Krupp- Remington, the RK-150, with 150-round drum maga- zine. She set off in a spiral search pattern to see if she could figure out what the hell happened. I stood in the shade, panting in the burning heat. Fredworld, at least this part of it, was hot as Hell, 54.5 degrees centigrade according to my wrist-therm. Sweat poured down my face; the perspiration didn't evaporate in that humidity, especially not under a helmet. I wished I had a standard-issue pressure suit with air conditioning; but we hadn't made any plans to stowaway aboard a Fred ship, so we didn't think to bring them along. Space suits we had, courtesy of Sears and Roebuck, but they didn't help with plane- tary temperature (I asked). Sears and Roebuck cautiously approached. As usu- al, they didn't seem the least affected by the heat or anything else. They peered around anxiously. "Are they all dead?" they asked. I shrugged. "Dead or gone. I don't see any bodies. Sanders is doing a sweep. We'll see what she says." I poked around a little. What I thought was a condo complex turned out to be a series of interconnected buildings, like the Pueblo Indians used to build in caves up a cliff, but these were built into the natural hollows formed by cracks in the ground. I saw what might have been molded furniture, but nothing of a personal nature. Of course, we didn't have a freaking clue what, if anything, a Fred would consider person- al. The buildings were bleached white, like all the color was burned out of them, leaving a pockmarked surface like pumice. Arlene's voice jumped at me through my ear receiv- er. "Fly, I think you'd better come over here. I've got a live one." "Live?" I asked, flipping up my dish antenna and homing in on her signal--standard armor-issue, very useful. "Oops, I mean a fresh dead body--maybe we can fix it and revive the bastard, figure out what blew through." "What? What?" demanded Sears and Roebuck, obviously hearing only my end of the conversation. "Come on, boys," I said, setting off at a trot, "need your magic over here." I jogged across the compound, turning as necessary to keep the beeps loud and fast. I found Arlene in two minutes, just half a klick distant as the Fly flies. She was crouching over a collapse of pumice stone, out of which stuck one part of a Fred hand and foot. Evidently, it had been unlucky enough to be caught in a building when it fell, thus not getting out in time to be disintegrated or kidnapped or whatever happened to the rest. Alas, the head was crushed to a pulp. "Damn," I griped. "Even if we can somehow revive its body, it can't tell us anything if its brain is destroyed." Sears and Roebuck knelt to examine the body. "The brain appears intact," they said, poking at the chest. Duhh! I mentally kicked my butt; I knew they didn't keep their brains in their heads, but it was hard to remember. Klave didn't either, as I recalled. "Can you fix it?" asked Arlene. "It'd be icy to know what the hell happened." Sears and Roebuck held the body down and drew a cutting laser, casually slicing away the head, legs, and arms. I nearly lost my lunch! The Klave were pretty cold from our point of view; even so, carving up a dead body just for laziness, to avoid hefting heavy stones off the limbs, was a bit much! They dragged the torso out of the rubble, knocking over a few stray stones with it. I winced with sympathy . . . even dead, I knew it could feel the pain of every blow. With the body tucked underneath their arms, Sears and Roebuck humped back toward the Fred ship, Arlene and me forming a Goddamned parade behind the macabre Klave pair. The Freds didn't divide their ship into separate departments, as humans do; they used something more like an old "object-oriented" approach to space- ship organization: different sections, like different counties, each had their own essential services-- food, water, navigation, engines, and medical equip- ment. God only knows how they divvied up the workload; maybe they fought for it! But Sears and Roebuck wandered around with the Fred body until they found a batch of machines that they claimed were "MedGrams," tossed the torso inside, and began poking blue and red buttons on a control panel. A couple of hours later--I watched, but Arlene went to sleep on one of the beds--the torso was flopping around, trying to move its nonexistent arms, legs, and head. "Great," I said, "but now what? It has no mouth; how can it tell us anything?" "Vocoder," said Sears and Roebuck, speaking for the first time since finding the body. They clipped a few more leads onto the chest of the Fred, palmed a touchplate, and a mechanical voice sounded through the speakers. ". . . DARES STAND AGAINST THE MIGHTY . . . WHO DARES THE DEMONS OF UNBE- HEADED SUNLIGHT WHO FOOLISHLY TEMPTS THE . . . PEOPLE OF THE DARK AND THE HOT THE PEOPLE OF THE CRACKS OF--" Sears and Roebuck turned it off. They fiddled with the settings and played it again, this time all in a weird language that made my teeth ache--presumably Sears and Roebuck's own language. Arlene had jerked awake at the first noise. She stared wildly, still trying to cold-boot her brain and figure out who was just shouting. "Pretty impressive," I said. "How did it know English?" Sears and Roebuck stared at me as if I were a particularly slow child. "Fly, you and Arlene have been talk around English for eight week now. What you did think the compu-nets were doing?" I got a creepy feeling in my gut, like a couple of poisonous centipedes had got loose in there. "You mean that thing has been listening to every word we say? Jesus." Arlene looked around nervously. "Has it been ... watching us, too?" "Sometimes." "Even when ... during my private moments, in the bathhouse?" "Sometimes," admitted Sears and Roebuck, adding nonchalantly, "we spent time observing you two, too. We are curious how you mates if you will demonstrate use of your mate apparatus." Arlene turned red as a radish; I'm not kidding! For years in the Light Drop, she had showered around men, used the toilet (or the ground) in front of men, and even had sex with Dodd in front of the guys when she got drunk once . . . and here she was flushing fire- engine red at the thought of an alien and a computer having seen her naked! I couldn't help laughing, and she glared M-14 rounds at me. "Need to find tuning," muttered Sears and Roe- buck, fooling with the buttons. I stared, reminded of about a thousand and one cheesy sci-fi movies that Arlene regularly made me watch while she gave run- ning commentary about which star's sister was the mistress of the head of Wildebeest Studios. ("Jeez, it's Dr. Mabuse," whispered Arlene in my ear.) "Try question them now," suggested Sears and Roebuck, pretending for their own peace of mind that there were really two Fred aliens instead of one. As a double-entity, Sears and Roebuck never had been able to deal with beings other than in pairs, pairs of pairs, and so forth: they had no trouble dealing with Fly and Arlene, but when it was Fly and Arlene and Captain Hidalgo, Sears and Roebuck threw a fit! I cleared my throat. "State your name for the record," I began, just trying to provoke some response from the Fred. "I will be Ramakapithduraagnazdifleramakanor--" "You will henceforth be designated Rumplestilt- skin," I decided. Damned if I were going to try to repeat that horrible squabble of sound! "Rumplestilt- skin, I am Taggart. You may also be questioned by Sanders and by Sears and Roebuck. You will answer all questions, or we'll leave you immobile on the planet surface forever." "Rumplestiltskin responds. What if he answers questions from the Taggart?" "You'll be disintegrated and your spirit will be sent wherever it goes upon disintegration." "Rumple bumple mumple humple .. ." "Do you accept the terms?" "Rumplestiltskin answers questions. Bumple." I sighed. I had to keep reminding myself we were peering directly into the brain of a Fred--a Fred that had lain dead for God knows how long, slowly going mad. In fact, that was a good first question. "Rumplestilt- skin: how long have you lain beneath the rubble?" "Rubble bubble wubble tubble--" "Rumplestiltskin will answer the question!" "I--I--I--I--I--Rumplestiltskin answers ques- tions. Rumplestiltskin lay for 19,392 suns." Arlene tapped at her watch calculator again. "This planet rotates four hundred and twelve times per orbit, so that's forty-seven Fredyears plus twenty- eight Freddays." "What's that in dog years?" I asked. "For us, that's about forty years, six months." "Jesus. Rumplestiltskin, were your people attacked nineteen thousand suns ago?" "Whack smack back crack whack smack back crack " "Who attacked you?" "Newbies soobies." "Was it a new species? Rumplestiltskin, how did you meet your attackers?" "Rumplestiltskin's people met the news on their own world we expand our great empire we conquer all we shall pound the Others into hotrock." I closed my eyes, sorting through the Fred's tangled speech. Arlene whispered into her throat mike, so I alone heard her speculation: "Fly, think they found a new species on its own planet, and somehow it ended up attacking and destroying the Fred home planet?" I grunted affirm; that was what I had figured from the yammering. But there were some real problems here; Sears and Roebuck had made it pretty clear that most species took millions of years to get from civilization to spaceflight--humans were such an exception that we caught the Fred by surprise. They first discovered us about four or five hundred years ago, while Spain and Portugal were still sailing out in wooden wind-driven ships to map the "New World." The Fred confidently assumed we were tens of thou- sands of years away from being able to offer any effective resistance. They didn't like us; they feared us because we, of all the intelligent races known in the galaxy, could die. They decided to exterminate us--another move in the megenia-long chess match for control of the galaxy. In the battle between the "Hyperrealists" and the "Deconstructionists," we played the role of Kefiri- stan, the poor unsophisticated farmer in whose back- yard a minor skirmish is fought. Hyperrealists, Deconstructionists--the terms were courtesy Sears and Roebuck, who searched long and hard through Earth philosophy and decided that wacko, effeminate, limp-wristed literary critics in New York were the finest, most refined philosophers of the bunch. What a kick in the nuts: this great, grand political war between two mighty empires turned on a doctrinal difference of aesthetics between two com- peting schools of literary criticism. Billions of lives hung in the balance between one dumbass way of dissecting "eleven fragment stories" and another, both of which missed the point entirely, of course. That much, Sears and Roebuck told us, but no more. I had no idea what the hell that meant; eleven story fragments? But try telling S and R that. His species, the Klave, were members of the Hyper- realist tong; the evil Freds represented the slimy, dishonorable Deconstructionist tong. Someday, somehow, I was going to beat those sons of bitches, Sears and Roebuck, into explaining the whole damned thing to me. In the meanwhile, I just shrug and thank God we soldiers don't have to understand politics in order to follow orders. Anyway, the Freds miscalculated . . . catastroph- ically. When they returned to Fredworld, raised an invasion force (taking about a century to do so), then returned, a mere half a millennium had passed--but to the Freds' shock, they found not a planetful of ig- norant, superstitious farmers and sailors, but a tech- nologically advanced, planet-wide culture with mis- siles, nuclear weapons, particle beams, spaceflight, and a brain trust unfrightened by horn and fang, scale and claw. Even after Arlene and I kicked their asses, when we left Earth, humanity was on the ropes . . . just like the old heavyweight Muhammad Ali. We played rope-a- dope with the "demons," and if Salt Lake City and Chicago were nuclear wastelands, so were the Fred bases on Phobos and Deimos. Worse, the last rem- nants of Fox Company--not only me and Arlene but Albert and our teenage hacker Jill--had managed to rescue the former human, now cyborg, Ken Estes, which gave us the potential to tap into the Fred's entire technology base. The Freds were genetically engineering human infiltrators, but we were training einsatzgruppen. God only knew what was going to happen, since we left Earth right at the exciting part. Or what had happened already, actually. I had to bear in mind that by the time we could return to the mother planet, four hundred years would have passed! The Freds made a critical miscalculation when they assumed humans evolved at the same rate as every- body else in the galaxy. Was it possible they made the same mistake again, this time to far more disastrous consequence? Time to get a bit more specific with Rumplestilt- skin: "When you found the Newbies, what was their technological level?" "Techno tackno crackno farmer harmer--" "Were they industrial or agricultural?" "Culture vulture nulture--" "Rumplestiltskin will answer. Were the Newbies technological?" "Evils! We came to herd as they herded we came to harvest as they harvested we came to wander as they wandered we came to herd as they herded!" Herding . . . harvesting--nomads? Farmers, just discovering animal husbandry? I prodded the undead Fred for another half hour, eliciting little other infor- mation. The best I could tell was that the "Newbies" had evidently just discovered agriculture and ranch- ing; they were just settling down from their nomadic life when the Fred scoutship observed and studied them. They made contact with the Newbies and fought a few skirmishes, just probing them. The Freds returned to Fredworld; this was probably three hundred or more years back, just around the time the first Fred expedition returned from contact with Earth. The Freds horsed around for a while, not long, then they returned to the Newbie system, just a couple of hundred years after they left . . . only to find that the Newbies had gone from the beginnings of agriculture to a heavily armed, spacefaring culture in just two centuries! And that's where Rumplestiltskin started to get hazy. The rest of the interrogation was long, tedious, boring, tedious, dull, and tedious; even Sears and Roebuck lost interest and started monkeying with the navigational system ... which was unlocked, now that we'd reached the preprogrammed destination. I figured Sears and Roebuck had never interrogated a prisoner before; it's not a process for the impatient. I got a story, but I had no idea whether I got the story. This is what I finally dragged out of old Rump, with me and Arlene making a lot of intuitive leaps and filling in the background as best we could: when the Freds arrived at the Newbie planet, ready to take the "empty" square in the giant chess game between the Hyperrealists and the Deconstructionists, they discovered a weird, unknown piece on the board. The Newbies must have an accelerated evolution that is as fast compared to us humans as we are compared to the rest of the galaxy! The Newbies were so stellar that they tore through the Fred fleet like a cat through a fleet of canaries. And then--this was the part neither I nor Arlene really bought, though it was such a lovely thought it was hard to resist--the Newbies backtracked the Freds and invaded Fredworld itself, utterly annihilat- ing it in revenge for trying to conquer the Newbies! What a beautiful picture--the Freds, in a panic, desperately defending their homeworld against an unknown foe who had been herding sheep and build- ing twig-and-wattle huts just two (subjective) centu- ries before! Arlene and I laughed long and loud at that one. Sears and Roebuck must have thought we were loons, since the Klave have nothing remotely like a "sense of humor" defense mechanism; they just look at each other. The last part of the story I got was the creepiest: Rumplestiltskin insisted, over and over, that those damned nasty Newbies were still here. But where? 4 Sears and Roebuck began yanking their heads back and forth again, expressing some sort of emotion only a Klave could understand. "What are you on about?" I demanded, still stewing about the missing Newbies. "We have faxed the injuns," declared our compatri- ot. "To where would like you to go?" Another hour had passed, and neither Arlene nor I had gotten another intelligible word out of Rumple- stiltskin. "What do you think?" I asked Arlene. "Has he fulfilled his part of the bargain?" She pursed her lips. "I can't think of anything else to ask. We've hit a brick wall in every direction now." Arlene inhaled deeply, then swallowed a nutrient pill. "Yeah, Fly, I guess he's done what he agreed. You going to burn him?" I shrugged. "I promised--deal's a deal." Gingerly, I reached across and pulled all the con- nections from the torso of the Fred. I looked across at Sears and Roebuck, but they had completely lost interest, their long arms reaching all around the Fred navigational unit, the one in this district of the ship, and disconnecting and reconnecting fiber-optic ca- bles. "You, ah, know where there's a Fred ray?" The Fred ray was the last-ditch weapon that they used against us when we rampaged through their base, and later their ship; it was some sort of particle beam weapon, much better than ours. Arlene had invento- ried the weapons on the Fred ship, including seventy- four Fred rays; she took me to the nearest one, leaving me to drag the torso behind. Turning my head away, praying to avoid vomiting and completely humiliating myself in front of my friend and subordinate, I balanced the torso on a neutron-repellant backdrop, the only thing that would stop the beam. The body fell over, and I set it up again. Then I stepped back and cranked the weapon around to point at the Fred's chest, where it stored its brain. "Man, I don't like doing this," I muttered. "Fly, he's been trapped dead underneath that rub- ble outside for forty years. One eye was open-- remember?" "So?" "So for four decades, Sergeant, Rumplestiltskin stared unblinking at the ground or the sky or the sun, knowing his entire species had been wiped out in the wink of an eye by an alien race they were going to enslave. Fly, he's suffered enough; don't trap him inside that corporeal bottle." My hands started shaking as I inserted a jerry- rigged pair of chopsticks into the holes to press the levers, simulating a Fred hand. Arlene put her hand on my shoulder. "You want I should do it?" I shook my head firmly. "No, A.S., didn't you read Old Yeller when you were a little girl?" "No, I was too busy reading Voyage to the Mush- room Planet and The Star Beast." "When your dog has to die, Arlene, you've got to shoot him yourself. You can't get someone else to shoot Old Yeller for you." I pressed the lever, completing the connection. As usual, we saw nothing. That was the part that both- ered me the most: as destructive as this neutron beam was, you'd think you would see something, for God's sake! A blue light, a lightning bolt, fire and brimstone--something. But the beam was as invisible as X-rays in the dentist's office, and as quiet; all I heard was a single click, and suddenly there was a huge hole through Rumplestiltskin's chest. Within three or four seconds, its body was boiling, the flesh vaporizing instantly wherever the beam touched. I slowly burned away the entire torso. The Fred ray was a gigantic eraser--everywhere I pointed, flesh simply vanished. A minute after turning on the beam, I clicked it off; nothing remained of the Fred but an invisible mist of organic molecules in a hot ionized plasma state. My guess was the interrogation was pretty permanently over. "Okay, kiddo," I said to A.S.; "let's go Newbie hunting." We suited up for combat, and for the first time in God knows how long, I found myself getting the shakes. Somehow, I'd thought the Freds would have burned all the fear out of me, leaving nothing but a cold husk of sociopathy. Not true. At the thought of going up against whatever it was that plowed the Freds into the dirt on their own home turf, my hands trembled so much I couldn't even StiKro my boots on tight. "Stay here and keep the engine running," I told Sears and Roebuck. "You want to start me the engines?" they asked, confused. "Just a figure of speech, you dufoids," Arlene explained. "But run through the launch sequence up to just before engine start .... We may have to book if we stumble onto a whole nest of them." Sears and Roebuck looked at each other, Alley Oop and his mirror image; they seemed perfectly content staying aboard the ship and letting the Marines do the dirty work. I sealed up the helmet and pressed the other armor seals tight; it wasn't a pressure suit, but in a pinch, we could survive a few minutes in hard vacuum. I noticed Arlene's face was whiter than its usual English pale; she must have figured the odds the same as I. My breath sounded loud in my ears as we edged down the gangway onto the surface of Fredworld again. The landscape looked eerily alive through the night-vis flipdowns, tinted green but combining infra- red, radio emission, and visible light enhancement. I turned slowly with a microwave motion detector; nothing moved around us, unless it was over the jagged mountains on the horizon. "This isn't good," I said over a shielded, encrypted channel to Arlene. "Shouldn't there be some life, even if the Newbies killed all the Freds?" "Maybe they couldn't tell which were Freds and which were animals, so they fragged everything. May- be they used a nuclear bomb, or some kind of poison or a biovector." I grunted. "Doesn't seem likely that they'd manage to get absolutely every living thing, does it?" "There's another possibility, Fly: maybe there are living animals, but they're just not moving." "Animal means moving, Arlene, like animated." She didn't answer, so I started a spiral sweep, mainly watching the outer perimeter. After three hours of recon, I was starting to regret being so nice and burning Rumplestiltskin's mortal coil, setting free his soul. "If that bastard lied to me--" "You'll what?" came Arlene's radio voice in my ear. "Resurrect him and kill him again?" "Maybe we should resurrect the Freds on the ship. Whoops, don't correct me; I just figured out how stupid that suggestion was." I managed to catch her while she was inhaling, or else she would have quickly snorted that the Freds on the ship knew even less about the Newbies than we--we had already killed them before we left for Fredworld, a hundred and sixty years before the Newbies landed! The weirdness of the place was starting to get to me. I kept seeing ghosts in my peripheral vision, but there was nothing when I whipped around with the motion detector. "Damn that Rumplestiltskin! He swore they were still here!" "Maybe he just meant they were here when he died?" I paused a long time. "Arlene, if that's all he meant, then we're in deep, deep trouble. I don't think you realize how deep." "I don't get you. If we can't find them, we jump back in the ship and return to--to Earth." She didn't say it, but I knew she was thinking to a dead, loveless Earth with no Albert Gallatin. "A.S., if we don't find the Newbies, I can almost guarantee they're going to find us. They'll find Earth. We were almost wiped out by the Freds. We barely hung on, and only because we evolved so much faster than they, we were so much more flexible--because they underestimated us! What the hell do you think would happen to humanity if the Newbies found us next?" "Jesus. I didn't think--" "And if they can go from stone plows and oxen to--to this in just two hundred years, where are they going to be just ten years from now? What if they don't find us for fifty years, or a hundred years? Jesus and Mary, Arlene; they would be gods." She was silent; I heard only my own breath. I almost considered asking her to switch to hot-mike, so I could hear her breathing as well, but I couldn't afford to lose control now, not when I had troops depending on me. Above all else, I had to demon- strate competence and confidence. "Fly," she said at last, "I don't like this. I'm getting scared." She wrapped her arms around her chest and shivered, as if feeling a chill wind or someone walking across her grave. "Maybe we can pick up some trace from orbit." "After forty years?" "Maybe Sears and Roebuck has some idea." Yeah, right. Sears and Roebuck never even heard of the Newbies until just now, and if they had that hard a time understanding us and our evolutionary rate-- Jeez, how could they even imagine the Newbies and what they might mutate into? "Let's head back," I decided. "We're not doing anything out here but scaring the pants off of each other." Arlene nodded gravely. "Kinky," she judged. I heard a strange, faint buzz in my earpiece as we headed back toward the ship . . . sounds, voices al- most. I could nearly believe they were whispers from the Fred ghosts, desperately trying to communicate-- perhaps still fighting the final battle that had de- stroyed them. I was now convinced that there was not a single artichoke-headed Fred left intact on that planet, except for the corpses we brought with us-- corpses we would never revive. In fact, I decided to leave them behind on Fredworld; the temptation to wake me dead, just tor someone to talk to, might be too great, overwhelming our common sense and self- preservation. But the notion of ghosts wasn't that far-fetched. Since their spirits never died, where did they go? I began to feel little stabs of cold on the back of my neck, icy fingers poking and prodding me. Jesus, shut off that imagination! I commanded myself. "Huh?" Arlene asked, jumping guiltily. "Criminey, Fly, are you a mind reader now?" I said nothing ... hadn't even been aware I spoke that last thought aloud; curious coincidence that it turned out to be perfectly appropriate. The ship was so huge that it was hard to recognize it as mobile; it looked like an artificial mountain, three- eighths of a kilometer high, over a hundred stories-- taller than the Hyundai Building in Nuevo Angeles-- and stretching to the vanishing point in either direc- tion. The landing pad was barely larger than the footprint of the ship, clearly built to order. Weird markings surrounded the LZ, the landing zone, burned into the glass-hard surface by an etching laser, either landing instructions or ritual hieroglyphs. They looked like they once had been pictograms, now stylized beyond recognition. "You know, Fly, we've never actually walked all the way around this puppy." "I know. I've been avoiding it. I don't like thinking of how big this damned ship really is." Arlene sounded pensive, even through the radio. "Honey, Sergeant, I've had this burning feeling--" "Try penicillin." "I've had this burning feeling that we have to walk this path, walk all the way around what's going to be our world for the next nine weeks, or however long it takes until we finally get ... home." I stared back and forth between the obsidian LZ and the ship door, torn. "You're right." I sighed. "We ought to reconnoiter. Arlene, take point." "Aye-aye, Skipper," she said, voice containing an odd mixture of elation and anxiety. She unslung her RK-150, and I flexed my grip on the old, reliable standard, the Marine-issue M-14, which contrary to the designator was more like an updated Browning automatic rifle than the Micronics series of M-7, -8, -10, and -12. These were heavy-lifting small arms, and the Freds were pretty pathetic when not surrounded by their "demonic" war machines. I don't know what we expected to run into on Fredworld; nothing good, I suspected. I thought about calling Sears and Roebuck and telling them what we were doing, but we were right outside. If they wanted us, they could call their own damned selves. Still feeling that chill on the nape of my neck, I followed Arlene at a safe twenty-five meters. It was hard not to be awestruck next to that ship. It was hard to credit; the Freds could do this, and they couldn't even conquer a low-tech race like humanity! They always taught us at Parris Island that heart and morale mattered more than tanks and air support in combat: look at the Mujahadeen in Afghanistan and Bosnia, at the Scythe of Glory in Kefiristan. But this was the first time I really believed that line: we really wanted the fight, and the Freds were unprepared for resistance. The ship was gunmetal gray along most of its flank, except where micrometeorites had scored the surface or punctured it. Thank God for self-sealing architec- ture; at the speeds we traversed the galaxy, cosmic dust sprayed through the ship like bullets through cheese. We reached the aft end and stared up at the single, staggeringly huge thruster. The ship was a ramjet, according to the specs: as it moved at increasing velocity relative to the interstellar hydrogen, an elec- tromagnetic net spread out in front of the boat, scooping up protons and alpha particles and funnel- ing them into the "jets," where the heat from direct conversion of matter to energy turned the hydrogen into a stream of plasma out the ass-end. No other way could we accelerate so near the speed of light in only three or four days. The thruster at the back looked exactly like a standpipe. I kid you not; I caught myself looking for the faucet that would turn on the water. We rounded the stern and headed for'ard again. About a kilometer