I wasn't about to wait for her to start plinking. Before she could squeeze off a round, I pointed my rifle and fired one shot from the hip. At that range, if I'd have missed, I would have turned in my Marine Corps T-shirt. I took her amid- ships, sinking her in her own wake. There was a time when I would've felt disgust and revulsion against myself for shooting a woman. I longed for such a time; now I felt only grim joy at having cut down another undead monster. The other two zombies opened fire, unperturbed by their companion's obliteration. I dropped behind an ornate rosewood trellis left over from when this section of the UAC facility was a visitor's center. Fortunately, these undead were proving to be just as bad a pair of marksmen as the ones in real life; it probably had a lot to do with the fact that they never blinked, and their eyes were perpetually so dry they could barely see. I dropped to my butt to steady the rifle--couldn't expect too many bursts of luck firing from the hip-- and fired a round into the farthest of the two (she had the better weapon, some sort of bolt-action rifle; the other had a shotgun and was too far for it to be effective). If I had any doubts about my new convert, I buried them; she hocked and spat into her hand, then hurled the flaming ball of snot into the face of the shotgun-toting zombie-gal. The shotgunner screamed a combination of pain and rage and started firing her shotgun in our direc- tion. A few of the pellets struck me and burned like hell, since I wasn't wearing armor yet. I don't find it until the next level down, I remembered. But I stuck to my plan and pumped three more rounds into the rifle- gal until she finally dropped before turning my atten- tion to the shotgun zombie. By then, she was dead, burned into a blackened corpse by Slink Slunk, my first apostle. When the battle abruptly ended, I sat still for a long time, head bowed. God, I prayed, can You really make me go through all this again? I took a deep breath and stood, a Marine again. "All right, if that's what has to be, then it has to be." But what would happen in the Resuscitator simulation if I died? Damned good question: can a spirit that's nothing more than bits in a huge computer go to heaven? Or would my death mean my absolute obliteration? "Screw it," I muttered. Marines are riflemen first and philosophers never. "Come on, Slink, let's get the hell out of Dodge." I led her through the long corridor between the trellises to the door that led to the ladderway down. The next level was Godawful, as I recalled: a black- dark maze, spineys galore, and maybe even the first pinkie--the horrible demons who were all mouth, bigger even than the mouth of doddering old Mick Jagger; he was threatening a comeback tour when Arlene and I upshipped from Earth, six months and three hundred and fifty years ago.... I wondered if he still was? I won't go into every freaking battle of every freaking level; if I could believe Overcaptain Tokug- havita, it's already been thoroughly documented, and everybody who might be interested has already read about it in school. It was the same game, the same terrain, but this time, I gathered converts like a snowball. It was never the majority opinion. Slink and I were pretty soon joined by four other spineys (Whack, Sniff, Chomp, and Swaller), a pumpkin named Olestradamus, and even, God help us, a zombie that used to be Pfc. Dodd, the man that Arlene once sacked out with for a few months. In the previous version of reality, we ran into Dodd on Deimos, not Phobos, so I knew my abused brain was playing games with memory. The architecture was even more movable than before, since now it needed only the whirr of comput- er software, not hydraulics, to slide walls up and down, to open floors beneath our feet, even to shift entire sections of the UAC facility from one side to the other. My goal remained the same as before: find Arlene! But now I had a different plan once I found her. Somehow, we had to find a way for the ghosts to break out of the machine. I swear to Almighty God, I promised, that I will not die in software limbo; I'll jack my way out of this place, me and Arlene, and get my ass back to the real world! The only question was whether I'd manage to do it before the Newbies "fixed" the entire human race. Slink, the other apostles, and I lived on medikits and snarling blue spheres; I ate the food thoughtfully left behind by the UAC workers and my own com- rades of Fox Company when they gave up the ghost; I didn't want to think about what my followers ate. The only real advantage to being back where it all began-- in simulation, at least--is that I didn't have to worry about amino acids and vitamins and whether or not Fred food or Newbie food was edible by humans; I didn't have to monkey with food-supplement pills, purify water, or eat lumps of so-called "food" that looked like overgrown escapees from a box of Lucky Charms. Blue squares! Orange squares! Pink dodeca- hedrons! When we climbed down to the third level, what felt like half a day after I first appeared for the second time at the mouth of the overrun facility, we were greeted by a welcoming committee of five spineys, several zombies, and even one of those spectral ghosts that sounded (and smelled) so much like pinkies, even though we couldn't see them. I finally had my biggest question answered: how in the world, in this world, would Slink and Chomp and my other spiney con- verts fight against others of their kind? So far as I could tell, their flaming snotballs had no effect on each other due to the oily and obviously flame- retardant secretions from the glands along their backs and chests. We dropped heavily from the ladder into a whole frigging pool of the toxic goo, and I actually felt it eat quickly through my boots and start in on my feet. I ran like hell across the mess--right into the waiting embrace of the defenders of the faithless. I fell back against the wall, firing off shot after shot from an over-and-under I had liberated from ex- Corporal Magett. When the last shell was exhausted, I dropped the shotgun and unslung my Sig-Cow. I couldn't see my buddies. I thought sure as hell I was going to renege on my promise to the Almighty about not dying in this limbo. Four spineys--I had killed the fifth--swarmed me, and I took three flaming mucus balls to my face; my skin felt like it was parboiled off'n me, and I couldn't see for crap. I raised the rifle and fired blindly, wishing I could cry--apologizing over and over, under and under my breath, to Arlene--another Fly failure! Then one of the huge brown monkeys screamed in agony and whirled to face its attacker. It was Pfc. Dodd, Arlene's ex, screaming in his unmistakable high-pitched voice, unchanged even af- ter reworking; he shot it again with his own Sig-Cow. I forced my eyes open a bit wider to aim a round and planted it deep into the spiney's brainpan. Two down, three to rip me to pieces. But suddenly the other three spineys came under assault from a rain of huge sharp stones! I dropped to my ass to avoid the bombardment--it was a veritable intifada of my spiney apostles! I guess they figured out that their snotballs wouldn't do anything to their heathen brethren ... so they started ripping chunks of masonry out of the walls and using that as a weapon! God, faith was already working miracles on the spineys' thought processes. They drove their enemies back and back, killing two of them. One was knocked silly, and we later converted him--he's the spiney who called himself Swaller. When they were all dead, fled, or better bred, Slink and Chomp, who were starting to become an item, hunted up a blue sphere for me. They cradled it carefully on a piece of plastic camouflage netting they stole from a dead Marine's helmet and smooshed it into my face, thank Christ. I went from zero to sixty in 1.2 seconds, and I actually felt human and alive again. Meanwhile, Whack and Sniff rounded up all the unexpended rounds of ammo they could scrounge. Days passed--it sure seemed like days, but maybe it was "really" only a few microseconds--and I was already in the habit of drawing a huge question mark over any time indicator and writing subjective time! beneath it, ever since Arlene and I started flitting around the galaxy at nearly the speed of light. This was just another example of relativity, I reckoned. But it seemed like days to us, and that's all I can say: days passed, and we were finally ready for the last descent into the final horrific level on Phobos. We were about to come face to face with our first hell princes--and the gates of Moloch that led to a whole new limbo on Deimos. I hesitated at the top of the long, long ladder that led down nearly a kilometer into the crust of that tiny moon Phobos. Phobos means fear, I remembered, though I didn't know what the significance was. "Okay, boys and girls," I said. "Are we ready to rock 'n' roll?" They nodded. Swallowing hard, wondering where in this world I would find Arlene Sanders, I put a foot and hand on the ladder and began the long descent into blackness. Below me I heard an inhuman scream that still, after all and everything, caused my stomach to contract and my sphincter to clench. I recognized that scream. 16 We climbed down a ladder so tall I got vertigo and almost dropped off to my death. I led, my gaggle of monstrapostles spread above me. The ladder was at least a kilometer long, much longer than in the real world--if that was the real world the first time-- obviously taken from a bitter, scary, nightmarish memory. At the bottom of the ladder was a small open elevator--a wire cage into which we all piled. It ground downward, scraping the walls of the shaft and groaning in agony at carrying so many. I started to get the shakes as the elevator led us into the high shelf-room; below us, I remembered, was a whole herd of pinkies. And so far, the pinkies had turned out not to have enough brains even to listen to my conversion speech. Maybe they were pre-verbal; I certainly couldn't hear any language in their snarls, grunts, and screams of rage or pain. Sighing, I bellied up to the edge of the floor, looking down on the churning floor that was actually a couple of dozen pink mouths-on-legs wandering around the room, squeezing past each other, tripping and shuf- fling together, every so often screaming and chomping on one another. I sighted more or less along the barrel of the over-and-under, which didn't have a forward sight, and squeezed off the first round. My spineys joined in, throwing snotwads, while Olestradamus and Dodd shot over the spineys' shoulders. Between the seven of us, we spread pinkie guts all over the room, leaving nothing after two minutes but the hot quivering corpses of twenty-five pink demons. My ears rang from the banging of the firearms, just mine and Dodd's, but it was close quarters, and the room echoed with every shot. The acrid stench of fricasseed pinkie burned my nostrils and throat, but at least they were all dead. I hopped lightly down the shelf and onto the killing floor. My cohorts thudded down like a herd of ele- phants. We headed down the corridor toward the final elevator, the one that led down to our old friends, the hell princes. Just before we got to the lift, we passed the infa- mous crack where I'd seen Arlene's skull and cross- bones pointing out the way she'd gone. I stopped and stared wistfully, wishing I could see my buddy again. Was she in her own version of the Phobos facility? Or was she still somewhere ahead? Last time, I'd found her in the first room in the Deimos installation, where I jumped after finding the Gate. This time, I turned away sadly and started up the corridor. As I walked past the crack, a powerful alabaster demon suddenly darted its hand through the crack and into the traffic lanes, grabbing me by the arm! I jerked back out of its grasp, raising my shotgun and hissing for backup. A vision of violence shambled out of the hole: savage bestial eyes, tendrils red as blood atop the head, dirt and less palatable contaminants caking the body. I jerked my scattergun around to unload a shell into this unholy new creature. But before I could squeeze the trigger, the bestial shape spoke, urgently whispering, "Don't shoot, Fly! It's me! It's A.S.!" The perspective shifted, and I was staring at Arlene Sanders in the flesh. When she saw the shotgun leveled at her, she squealed like a mouse, then dove for cover, but I was already dropping the mouth of the weapon and rushing forward to yank her out of the crack. She held her shotgun half to the ready, panicked eyes flickering back and forth between me and the passel of imps, a zombie, and one pumpkin in my wake. "What the--what the--Fly, what the hell is this crap?" Arlene's face was drained of blood; she was trying really, really hard not to simply open fire on the "mortal enemies" at my back! "Hold your fire, Lance. Meet . . . your new pla- toon. Fly's Freaks." Suddenly, I thought about Dodd; while Arlene was reluctantly approaching Slink and the other spineys, I quietly leaned over to Dodd and ordered him into the shadows. I didn't know how Arlene would react; Dodd was the zombie that used to be-- "Jesus, Fly," she said, "you sure can pick 'em." We held each other for a few seconds, reveling in the quiet reunion of two soldiers deep behind enemy lines. Then I sent Slink ahead to watch for the hell princes and asked Arlene what she had done for the past two days since appearing in this horrible maze. "You're going to laugh," she gloomily predicted. "Laugh?" "It's really stupid." "Hey, I've got an idea--instead of reporting on your report, why don't you just give me your report?" "Oh, thanks, Sweetie, pull rank. All right, but you're going to freak." I put my hands on Arlene's hard, almost masculine shoulders. "Kiddo, I'm going to tear you apart like a wishbone if you don't spit it out. Where have you been the last two days?" "Here." "Yes, yes, in the UAC labyrinth. But how did you get this far? I barely did it last time--more luck than anything else. How did you make it without a scratch?" "No, here here--right here, where you're stand- ing." "You appeared here?" "On this very X." I stared, confused. "But why? I appeared back at the entrance." "Why?" she asked, turning the spotlight back on yours truly. "Hell, I don't know! Ask the goddamned Newbies." She smiled and turned up her hands. "How should I know why I appeared here? I knew you only had one way to go--down--so I figured I'd just sit tight and wait, rather than stomp all around the place and risk maybe passing you in the dark." "The pinkies didn't smell you?" She laughed, a musical tone not too different from a silver glockenspiel. "Of course they did! They've been up and down this freaking hallway so many times, I'm surprised they didn't dig a trench with their feet. I just ducked inside my hole here whenever I heard them coming; they're not exactly light on their feet." We looked up the corridor to where Slink hovered at the doorway, her ear cocked for the sounds of the minotaurs at the center of the labyrinth, the hell princes. Even from where I stood, I heard them screaming and growling, stomping up and down. "They can tell there's something wrong nearby," I whispered in Arlene's ear, "but if they really knew we were here, I think they'd already have come charging out." "They didn't charge me last time I was here, and I made a lot of noise. Didn't notice me until I went through that door and down the stairs. I think they don't hear too well, and they're used to a lot of noise from the pinkies anyway." "But they smell something, right?" Arlene wrinkled her freckled nose and grimaced. "Mainly what they ought to smell is spiney! Don't take this wrong, Sarge, but your new platoon stinks to high heaven." I looked left and right along the dank stone hallway, stones piled on top of each other without any sign of mortar or cement. I looked at my platoon--not as good as Marines, sure, but could anyone do better? "This is what you meant by saying 'Patrick,' isn't it?" "Patrick? What the hell are you talking about?" "Just before the Newbies sucked our brains out. You looked at me and said 'Patrick,' and I figured you meant to convert the monsters, like Saint Pat con- verted the Irish heathens." She lowered her orange brows, not following the turn of conversation. "I said 'battery,' not Patrick, you idiot!" I glared in annoyance. "You didn't mean I should convert the demons?" Arlene waited so long I thought she had fallen asleep. "Fly," she said at last, patiently, as if to a child, "how would I have known the Newbies were going to send us here?" "Oh," I said, face turning ruddy, "I guess I didn't think of that." "I said battery--find the battery, the power source. . . . There has to be some connection, a hard connec- tion, between the RAM we're running in as programs and the bus, the motherboard, whatever you want to call it; the thing that everything else plugs into!" I shook my head. "How do you know they use that kind of configuration in this computer?" "I don't know, but they probably use something like it! This intense and fast a simulation--remember what the Resuscitators said about wanting everything to move fast?--that sucks a lot of juice. Basically, the faster you want to go, the more energy you need, and it's got to come from somewhere." "All right, so there's a power source. So what? We can't shut it off--we'd die." Arlene blew air out her closed lips in exasperation. "We don't shut it off! That's our key, that's the door. . . . If we can piggyback the datastream that defines us inside this simulation onto that energy flow, we can back out of this freaking place and into the rest of the computer, maybe even into the operating system of the Resuscitator ship." "You think we're on the ship? Why?" She shrugged, looking so much like Arlene I got chills. "What else are they going to do, hang around the rock we just left? What's Skinwalker to them? It's probably just the nearest planetary system to Newbie prime. Why else would they decide to come here?" "Well . . . the Newbie we had on the Disrespect was part of the invasion fleet that wiped out the Fred; what if ... what if they came to Skinwalker for a more important reason?" "What?" "Maybe they came here in search of us?" She stared, not saying a word, so I continued. "Maybe they picked up some mention of us and our so-called nonbiological status, and how much that scared the Freds, when they annihilated them. So then they went out hunting for us. Maybe they knew this was our nearest base; maybe there was some record among the Freds." "Couldn't have gotten here in time. We came on a lightspeed ship--no message could come faster, and there was no settlement here when we left Earth, anyway." I shrugged. "They were on their way here, though. Our prisoner said so!" Arlene slowly shook her head, eyes closed, then she massaged the bridge of her nose. No question, this really, truly was my buddy; every mannerism was exactly right. The Arlene Sanders in this computer world wasn't just an alien program designed to fool me: somehow, the Res-men really had built a device that sucked her soul out and trapped it here. Until I had found her, I had my doubts. I stared up at Slink, who looked tense but not frantic. Evidently, the gruesome red fiends were still agitated but hadn't yet decided to investigate. "Hey Lance, you really want to charge through that door and fight the hell princes?" I asked. "Not particularly, Fly-boy." "How's about we set the spineys and the zombie to making this crack wide enough for all of us?" Arlene raised one eyebrow--an expression she had practiced night and day for months because of some television character who did it. "Highly logical, Cap- tain." I recoiled in horror. "Good God, don't commission me as an officer! Officers have to go to college, and you know what I think of college grads." She ought to; I'd only spelled it out a thousand times! See, at Parris Island, I was an assistant DI when I first made corporal. You give a recruit an order, and even if he doesn't understand it, he will, by God, run off and try to do something. But Gunnery Sergeant Goforth used to be a DI over at Quantico in the Marine Corps Officer Candidate School, and he told us that when he gave an officer candidate an order that the kid didn't understand, he would stand there like a dummy and try to clarify it! "Sir, this candidate does not understand the drill instructor's order!" Gunny Goforth went bugfreak trying to get the candidates to do something, any- thing, anything but just stand there and discuss the situation! The gunny especially hated, when he gave an order, the sort of rummy way the candidate would just say "sir?"--with a look of utter bewilderment--like he'd never even heard of such a command. Like no one had ever heard of such a command . . . like nobody in his right mind would ever dream of issuing such a bizarre command! "You falkin' piece of shee-it! Just falkin' pick up th'falkin' FOD off'n th' falkin' RUNway and don' falkin' say another falkin' 'SIR,' or I's gone to rip your falkin' HAID off and YOU-rinate down yo' neck!" Gunny Goforth was from South Carolina, and his hatred of college-educated officer candidates was leg- endary. It was the college education; I was morally certain of it. They say college teaches you how to think, but I think it really teaches you how to jerk gunnery sergeants around by the short hairs. I whistled very low, catching everyone's attention. I set Olestradamus to guard the door instead of Slink, and all the spineys--and Pfc. Dodd--came forward to tear down the wall, or enough of it that we could all escape the way Arlene did last time. I'd deliberately kept him in the shadows. I wasn't sure how Arlene would react to her former lover, now zombie. I wished I could have softened the blow somewhat. Maybe I handled it all wrong. When Arlene saw Dodd, she turned white, paler than usual, so much so it was easily visible in the gloom. She fell back against the wall and started hyperventilating, staring at him. This wasn't the first time she had seen Dodd as a zombie. We caught up with him the last time on Deimos, just after jumping through the Gate--the same Gate that was just outside the crack we were working on. That time, he shambled out of the blackness ready to blow us apart, reworked so thor- oughly he didn't even recognize his once and future intended. I was sick back then, sick at heart. I knew I would have to kill the SOB, and Arlene would hate me forever, and hate herself for hating me when I only did what I had to do. But a miracle happened, the first one I'd seen on that trip, but not the last. Arlene suddenly found it inside herself to shove me out of the way and kill zombie-Dodd herself; that way, she couldn't really hate anybody. It was a hell of a thing for her to do, one of the reasons I love her so much, my best bud. Now . . . what did this mean, now we had Pfc. Wilhelm Dodd as one of our crew? But a Dodd who not only didn't remember sleeping with Arlene and loving her, but also didn't remember being killed by her. But Arlene remembered, God help her. She remembered killing her boyfriend. She blew his head off and watched the body topple like a dead tree. "Christ," she muttered beneath her breath, closing her eyes and turning away. "Christ, Fly. Did you have to run into . . . into him?" I didn't know whether Albert made it easier or harder. She had thought she loved Dodd until she met Albert Gallatin. But maybe her feelings for Albert were colored by what she'd done to Dodd, and what we all were sharing: the destruction of our planet and our entire race. At least, I knew those thoughts were firing through her brain; if I could think them with my limited mental capacity for speculation, sure as hell Arlene was obsessing about them herself. She swallowed the emotions down and became a Marine again. Dodd wasn't Dodd; he was a zombie . . . and now a platoon member. She did what she had to do. She was a U.S. Marine--semper fi, Mac. The spiney imps got busy ripping away at the masonry; Arlene and I tried to help, but human hands simply weren't strong enough to do the dirty work. We caught stones as they fell and lugged them away, trying to make as little noise as possible; the pinkies were damned noisy as a rule, and the hell princes should be used to the noise . . . but still, the last thing I wanted-- We almost, damn near made it. Slink and the other spineys--Whack, Swaller, Sniff and Chomp--used their iron nails to grind away at the crack, scraping stone away. It was already wide enough for me and Arlene (and Dodd, of course), and nearly so for the imps, but the pumpkin Olestradamus was a big prob- lem: I snapped my fingers until I got his--her?-- attention and gestured it over. "Can you deflate?" I asked. It didn't say anything but looked puzzled. "I mean, is there any way you can suck in a little at the sides, like, and squeeze through that crack?" Olestradamus floated closer to the hole and stared through it. The pumpkin had not yet spoken; I only knew I had converted it by the fact that it no longer opened its mouth and spat lightning balls at me. This is how the scene happened: we'd been battling the pumpkin in a small room, Slink and Chomp and I, taking cover behind a stone couch built for some gigantic monster with a really hard butt. While the pumpkin floated to each corner of the room, firing lightning balls at us from every conceivable angle, we screamed out our spiel about the simulation. I almost bit my tongue in half when Slink shouted out, "Masssster sshall produce miracle! Then you sshall know!" It wasn't exactly like I could just close my eyes and envision a vase of flowers appearing in the middle of the room! What was I supposed to do, suddenly "remember" that the water in the fountain was really wine? Sure, kid, sure, that would be great . . . only it didn't work that way. I couldn't "remember" some- thing so totally different because my real memory got in the way. Maybe if I were one of Arlene's religious teachers, the ones she was forever reading about-- Bodhisatvas, something like that--maybe I could perfectly visualize a Fredworld where pumpkins were only beachballs, imps were crash-test dummies, and the pinkies all wore monkey suits and served cock- tails. But I was just Flynn Taggart, and I had too good a memory to play that game. Alas, I remembered just how bad-tempered the pumpkins were . . . and this one was proving how damned good my memory was with every electrical belch. I wished that somehow Sears and Roebuck had been transferred with me; I sure could have used those gigantic Magilla Gorilla arms to pop that overinflated monster. And then an astonishing thing happened. While the pumpkin was floating around the blue-glowing room, with flickering light from several shredded light tubes, it managed to wedge itself into the small space between the stone couch and a shred of illuminating panel on the ceiling. Trying to extricate itself, the pumpkin managed to rotate so that its mouth was pointed directly skyward. Then, in frustration, seeing us in the corner of its peripheral vision, so close, touching distance--the dweebie pumpkin fired a round . . . directly up into the powerful circuitry. The short-circuit in the light tube must have acted like a capacitor, because there was a violent spark-flinging feedback loop, and the pumpkin ended up taking a jolt that must have been a hundred times the amperage of its own lightning, judging by the acrid smell of ozone. The zap scrambled every neural circuit in the pumpkin's brain. It must have blown through all of its metaprogramming, letting me reach right down into the deepest part of its brain and convert it on the spot--like it had seen God directly, that's how it responded. I turned it, we became friends. Turns out the things can talk, they just don't have much to say (too full of hot air, hah hah). Their voices are at the extreme low end of the frequency range of a human ear. Olestradamus sounded like Darth Vader played on a tape running half-speed. But now I waited expectantly for Olestradamus to answer. After a long moment staring out the crack, it rotated to face us and sadly said, "N-n-no. C-c-c-ann- n-not fit." I wondered if I had the only pumpkin who stuttered, or if that were a racial characteristic of all pumpkins. Olestradamus rotated to return to its post and froze: standing in the doorway was a hell prince. The freaking thing had finally decided to go upstairs and check on the weird silence . . . and with amazing foresight, it had chosen the exact instant that the door was unguarded! The hell prince recovered before I did. It raised its arm and fired a blast of the greenish energy beam from a wrist launcher. But Olestradamus was faster! I wouldn't have believed it possible; I'd never seen a pumpkin move so quickly. But it was in between us and the hell prince fast enough to catch the blow meant for Arlene. Olestradamus screamed in rage and pain, and re- turned fire with the lightning balls. I turned back to Arlene. "Move your gorgeous ass, A.S.!" Unceremo- niously, I grabbed her by the butt and scruff of the neck and propelled her through the hole, dumping her face-first a dozen feet down into what sounded like squishy mud. "Slink, Whack, Chomp, Dodd--punch it, through the gap!" My apostles squeezed through the gap, which was almost wide enough for a spiney, and followed Arlene to the ground. I hoped to hell she had shaken off enough daze to roll put of the way before the two- hundred-kilogram spineys dropped on her head. I leveled my shotgun, we were at such close quar- ters, and tried to get a shot around Olestradamus, but the pumpkin was too fat, too round! It and the hell prince were going at it--well, I was going to say fang and claw, but I guess it was actually mouth and wrist launcher. God, but the two races must have hated each other. But why? I remembered seeing hell-prince bodies lining the walls of one pumpkin chamber and dead deflated pumpkins strewn about the floor of another hall owned by hell princes. I guessed the only two creatures that hated each other more were steam demons and the spidermind. They were both pretty torn up. Olestradamus blocked the entire passageway, and the hell prince effectively filled the doorway, which was a good thing, because I could just glimpse the second hell prince behind the first--but he couldn't get off a shot around his compatriot. "Come on, forget it!" I bellowed. "We're through. . . . Pull back and hide--convert your brothers!" But Olestradamus didn't hear; it was too busy teaching its mortal enemy what it meant to incur the wrath of a pumpkin. And then I heard the sound I most dreaded: the flatulent noise of an inflated pumpkin popping, meet- ing its airy doom. Olestradamus collapsed into a huddled heap of rubbery flesh on the floor. It belched no more lightning. We had our first martyr on the holy quest to punish the false ones. I stepped back into the shadows of the crack. The stupid hell prince had gotten so fixated on killing its race enemy that it had entirely forgotten about me and the rest of the crew. It staggered forward, obvi- ously ninety percent dead on its feet. I was happy to supply the missing tenth. As it crouched unsteadily over the body of our loving Olestradamus, the most intelligent inflated floater I had ever known, I raised my duck gun and unloaded a shell at point-blank range into the hell prince's tem- ple. I only wished I still had the beloved double- barreled shotgun I had carried through the entire campaign on Earth. I guess Olestradamus must have torn up the hell prince more than I thought. I expected the creature to be hurt; but hell, one just like it had taken a shot directly amidships with a rocket, for Pete's sake, and lived. But this one didn't; it dropped heavily, groaning . . . and ten seconds later, it was dead, green blood and gooshie brain goo dribbling out its head. The other came charging out, but it was too late; I stepped back once more, launching myself through the crack and down about five meters to the wet peat below. I fell hard, stunning myself. As I came back to consciousness a moment later, I found I had made a giant-size mud angel. The hell prince stood at the crack and tried to fire through it, but we ran under the overhanging piece of building, completely unhittable. Thank the devil our intrepid imps hadn't made the hole any bigger; the hell prince was only just barely too big to fit. Arlene steadied me, and I told the crew what had happened to poor Olestradamus. Arlene made the same point about him, her, it being a martyr, and I explained the concept to Slink for later processing to the other apostles. Above us was sky, horribly enough; we had come down more than two kilometers through the solid rock of Phobos . . . and here, at the bottom, directly overhead we saw the stars! It made no geographic sense, but, of course, it didn't have to--it was nothing but computer software, after all. Across the field, I saw the raised platform that was the Gate. I pointed. "Well, men, I hate to say it, but if we're going to find that power source, we'd better get the hell off Phobos." Arlene raised her eyebrows, then shrugged. "Well, sayonara, Phobos. And I was so looking forward to a more extended visit." Yeah, right, A.S. 17 Marines are like cats. They sleep lightly, half an eye peeled for charlie, sniffing the air like a huge carnivorous tiger that's always hungry. They can fall asleep standing up, in zero-g, during reentry, even while marching on the flipping parade ground. Don't ever try to sneak up on a Marine; Jesus the Anointed One walking on the water makes enough racket to jerk a Marine awake from a sound sleep. And when a Marine wakes up, he's on his feet in one fluid move- ment, rifle in hand, fully alert in less time than the fastest microprocessor takes to execute a single machine-code command. Except me, that is. Fly Taggart wakes up not remembering his own name, bleary and groggy, eye- lids glued shut with little pieces of sleep. I stagger like one of the Fred-worked zombies with a mouth full of cotton, inarticulately begging and pleading for some life-giving coffee. Usually it takes two recruits and a burly Pfc. to slap some sense into me in the morning. This time, it took a scared lance corporal. Arlene snapped me out of my coma by the simplest possible means: she started kicking me in the ribs, gently at first, getting harder and harder, until at last I blindly reached out a meaty ham-fist and caught her ankle in mid-kick. Without waking more than halfway, I jerked her off her feet and snarled something about not tickling a man when he's trying to get some Z's. Then I blinked awake. I sat up on a blue-specked dirt patch overgrown with clumps of sharp, brittle, blue grass that seemed to undulate, though I couldn't quite tell for sure. Arlene picked herself up, brushing the dirt from her uniform and rubbing her knee. "Damn you, Sarge!" she stage-whispered. "I was just trying to get up quietly." Taking my cue from the lance corporal, I kept my own voice low. "What the hell is going on? Last thing I remember, I was strapped to a table and the New- bies were trying to suck my brains out with a vacuum cleaner." I stared around. Arlene and I sat atop a small hill that faintly rippled. In the distance, I saw the human- built ship, the Disrespect to Death-Bringing Decon- structionists. It was even smaller than I imagined, utterly dwarfed by my memory of the Fred ship. I would still love to see them side by side, though. The Disrespect looked far sleeker and more elegant. In all other directions was a flat plain, broken only by immensely tall thin trees. They swayed so easily, though, in the faintest air current, that maybe they were just very tall grass. Blue was the color of the day. I knew for a fact that the desert we had walked across from the Fred ship was brownish gray, with not a trace of blue. I bent down and looked close at the ground: the blue specks that colored the entire terrain were actually tiny bugs! Almost microscopic insects swarming over everything--over me and Arlene, even. I cringed for a moment; I've always hated bugs. But there wasn't anything I could do about it, and I didn't feel any pain. Alas, even Ninepin had deserted us. I had no idea where he had got to, but he was gone, the inadvertent little traitor. "Arlene--" "Yeah, I know. You can't even brush 'em off; they're too small. I figure they must eat microbes, so maybe they're not all bad." "Arlene, where the hell are we?" She shrugged. The blue critters in her bright red hair turned her head purple. "Near as I can deduce, Fly, the Resuscitators tried to suck our souls out; my nose still hurts like hell." Now that she mentioned it, I realized my own sinuses felt like some combat engineer was cranking a hand drill inside. "But we're still here--I think. Do you feel any different?" She shook her head. "Nada. Whatever kind of soul I had before, it sure feels the same now." Then she turned her head and squinted in the direction of the ship. "On the other hand, would we even know if it was changed?" I started to stand, but she put out a hand and held me down to a crouch. "Fly, they're down there, bottom of the hill." "Who?" "Your converts--the fourteen still left alive who didn't despair and get reinfected. Sears and Roebuck are down there, too--their bodies. The freaking New- bies killed them to shut them up--they wouldn't stop arguing about them using the machine, and then when the Res-men started sucking out your soul, S and R actually attacked them!" "Jesus! Kill anyone?" "I couldn't believe their strength. Their little legs spun like a gyroscope . . . you know how they chug so fast, their legs are just blurs? They dashed around the room at high velocity, breaking necks and crushing skulls with those powerful Magilla Gorilla arms of theirs. It was beautiful!" "How many did they get?" "At least eight Res-men murdered while they stu- pidly tried to aim their shots. You can't hit something moving that fast by aiming at it!" "You got to lead it." "Yeah, but which way? Sears and Roebuck kept changing direction so fast, I thought I was looking at a UFO! So finally one of the Res-men must've got an infusion of brains from the Newbie molecules infect- ing her, she grabbed a laser cannon and just held the trigger in while she swept the beam back and forth across the room, fast as she could. Did you know Klave can jump like mofos?" "They can probably run up the walls, with the speed they're capable of." "But she finally got them. Cut the boys down on the downbeat." I blinked. Man, I'm out for five minutes, and look what I miss! It was like going out for popcorn, and when you get back, the giant ants are already devour- ing Austin. "Christ, then what?" "Then they finished with you like nothing hap- pened, and they started on me, and I woke up here. I was lying next to you, but you were stiff as granite, even though your heart was beating and your lungs breathing. I figured you were brain-dead . . . and I guess that's what Tokughavita thought." "How do you know they're all down there?" "How do you think? I'm Marine Corps recon.... I crawled to the edge of that ridge and reconnoitered. They're all down there in a circle--looks like they're performing some sort of shamanic ritual. They're bobbing their heads like pigeons." I crawled as quietly as I could to the ledge she indicated and looked down on our converts. I recog- nized the overcaptain and several of the boys. "Sha- manic ritual? Jeez, Arlene, they're praying. Haven't you ever been to church, you heathen?" "That's what I said, a magical ritual." She squirmed up beside me. I couldn't help smiling, she felt so good. "Wonder what the hell they're praying for?" I stared at her, exasperated. "Probably for the safe return of our souls to our bodies, you moron." She raised her eyebrows and pursed her lips. "Man . . . are you trying to tell me that stuff works?" "Worked this time, I reckon. Come on, babe, let's go down and scare the hell out of the natives." We had nothing better to do, so we rose and descended maje