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 detaile