stically from the mount. When we were almost down, one of the converts shouted and pointed; his mouth moved, but no words came out. In three seconds, the rest of them had scrambled to their feet and were staring silently, stunned and awed. I stopped where I was and spread my arms. "Be- hold," I declared. "I have risen from the dead. Let this be the reward for your unwavering faith!" I felt a prickling in the back of my neck. I didn't dare look up.... I knew what it was: God the Angry Father was glaring at me for my blasphemy. But it was in a good cause! We had to keep their level of faith high, so if there were any molecular Newbies floating around, they couldn't get a toehold. Somehow, strong faith, faith in anything, seemed to stop them. Maybe it created some sort of chemical imbalance? Hell, that was for the college creeps to figure out. I just wanted to fight the bastards! Toku and the Converts--didn't I see them at Lollapalooza?--swarmed us like locusts on a wheat field, and Arlene kept pushing them back so they wouldn't mob me. "Chill, chill, you clowns! Get your asses back over the line--I want you to stay at least four paces from me, or I pull out the nutcracker!" The two of us got them simmered down enough for Tokughavita to tell us what happened after Arlene and I were killed. "Didn't know what to do," he explained, turning up his hands. "Said you were dead, souls gone. Believed--saw no signs of life in eyes!" "I don't get it," I said. "Did the thing work, or didn't it?" "Took bodies down from tables. Resuscitators gave them to us, said they were meat only, no further use. Cast us out, said we were unfixable, ruined. Called faith ruin and fatal flaw in operating system." I smiled. I could just imagine the Res-men's frustra- tion. Suddenly, they were locked out of what had been their comfortable home, the human mind, for the last God knows how long! If I were any judge of character, the bastards were really running scared now. "So they're still in there?" I nodded at the ship. "Yes, master, still present, but cannot get at them. Activated all ship's defenses." "So he drove out the man." It was a sweet voice. . . . "And he placed at the east of the garden of Eden Cherubims, and a flaming sword which turned every way, to keep the way of the tree of life." I turned to Arlene, nonplussed. "I didn't know you knew the Bible." "I, uh, I don't. I just know that verse. I must have heard it in a movie or something." "Activated launch sequence," continued the over- captain. "Ship launches in thirty minutes. Should get to cover, otherwise we'll be burned black." The other remnants of the Fearsome Flies grabbed all their stuff and bundled it up, but I caught myself wondering: if Arlene and I hadn't awakened just then, would these goofs have sat right there, while the ship launched and burned them alive? I winced at the thought; they had faith, but I obviously needed to work a bit on the common-sense aspect of religion. We stood over the bodies of Sears and Roebuck. From where I stood, the wounds didn't look all that bad . . . but where I stood was a million klicks away from the medical lab on the Disrespect. Yet we couldn't just leave them there! If their bodies were burned, not only would their spirits be irrevocably lost, left to wander the barren dunes and blue bug- covered plains, but they would feel every microsec- ond of the incineration . . . and they would re- member. "Jeez, Fly, that was a hell of an act of bravery on S and R's part. I mean, here we are, hundreds of light- years from the Klave homeworld. They must have known the odds were slim to none that we'd be able to resuscitate them." Arlene crouched, staring cau- tiously at Sears and Roebuck, unlikeliest of heroes. An idea was starting to germinate in my brain. "Toku, you guys got a hovercar or landrover or something down here?" He looked puzzled, scratching his chin. The hirsute overcaptain desperately needed a shave; he was start- ing to look like a chimpanzee balancing on its hind legs. "Don't know. Different department." Yeesh, here we went again with the ultraindividual- ism! I gathered them around us in a circle. "All right, you proto-jarheads, did any of you drive a vehicle off that ship?" Silence, many heads shaking. Arlene put her hand on my arm. "Excuse me, Sarge, you're not asking that right. May I?" I waited a moment, eyes flicking back and forth, then I grunted assent. "Dudes," she began, "did any of you see a vehicle on the dirt here?" Instantly, half a dozen hands went up. The crew- men started talking all at once, but they quickly compared stories and pointed along the axis of the ship, heading aft. "About three kilometers," ex- plained the overcaptain. I wanted to strangle the entire lot of literal doof- uses! Drive it off the ship . . . Jeez! I glanced at Arlene, who said, "Come on, Fly, you know which of us is the better runner." "Take off, kiddo, and for God's sake, make it the fastest 3 K you've ever run. Wait, which of you is really fast?" Every hand shot skyward. I rolled my eyes. These guys were worse than the natives on the island where everyone either always lies or always tells the truth! "Look, I know each of you is the fastest SOB in the outfit ... so every man point at the second fastest dude." I had fourteen converts: six pointed at one guy, four pointed at another, and the other two pointed at each other. The two winners were startled by the sudden attention and didn't point at anyone. "Right, you and you, follow Corporal Sanders. Move out!" I sat down to wait, trying my damnedest to look completely calm and patient. In reality, I was about ready to chew the heads off a bag of ten-penny nails. I was still waiting in exactly the same posture, having forced myself to be utterly still, when Arlene and the boys "drove" up twenty-one minutes later in a hovercar. By then, everyone was nervously sneaking peeks at his watch--except Overcaptain Tokughavita, the only man with utter, absolute faith in me. He knew I wouldn't let them down, even if I had no control whatsoever over the search for the land cart! The cart was pretty similar to the one I'd used on Phobos a couple of centuries ago, except it was big enough to collect a few tons of samples. The cart was huge and blue: ten meters from stem to stern and two meters wide, with a foldable gate around the bed. It liked to sit about six meters above the deck, maintain- ing altitude with some sort of air-jet arrangement, instead of the fans that levitated the land carts on Mars. The engine looked complex, and it was totally exposed, not even a cowling; I couldn't make head or tail out of the guts. It was nothing like the fan-levs I had taken apart in the Pendleton motor pool a few years and a couple of stripes ago. An engineer named Abumaha was watching the ship, and he announced that the tail had begun to smoke. That meant we had all of three minutes before the ship blasted into orbit. "All hands, throw everything onto the land sled, don't worry about the order--move!" Arlene and I took personal charge of the bodies of Sears and Roebuck, carefully laying them atop a nice soft pile of clothing and coats. The boys (including two girls) leapt aboard, just as the tail of the ship suddenly turned too bright to look at with the naked eye. The Res-men had fired up the fusion reactor. "Arlene," I said softly, "get us the f out of here, okay?" She jammed on the throttle, and I was hurled to the deck. One crewman almost tumbled out the back, but Tokughavita caught him by the hair and the scruff of his neck and hauled him back aboard. One minute later, we were already half a klick away . . . and the darkening sky suddenly lit up as bright as a dozen suns. The Disrespect was launching toward orbit. We ran fast, faster, but the Shockwave caught up with us nonetheless. It rocked the cart so viciously that Arlene backed off the throttle and pulled up to a halt. Good thing. With the second jolt, I was hurled out of the land cart! I hit the ground heavily, too stunned to stand, but not too stunned to laugh at Arlene's attempts to settle the hovercraft onto the ground to pick me up. The ground shimmied and shook beneath me, so I stayed on my butt, my back turned to a fusion reaction bright enough to burn out my retinas in a millisecond. At last, she got the thing onto the ground, scooped me inside, and headed away again. Behind us, the ship cleared the lower atmosphere, and we stopped hearing the roar of exploding gases around the engine nozzle, hot as a stellar core. "Where to, O Exalted One?" Arlene asked. "Where do you think? Back to the Fred ship so we can repair Sears and Roebuck. If any two can figure out a way off this rock, they can. And Arlene . . . change drivers, huh? I wouldn't mind getting there intact." 18 "No, no, saw them! Saw you in computer." Overcaptain Tokughavita was struggling to convince Arlene and me that the Res-man soul-sucker really had worked as advertised. "But we're not in the freaking computer," ex- plained my lance with amazing patience, for her. "We're sitting in this stupid hovercraft, listening to your drivel about us being sucked out of our bodies and plopped into a computer." Tokughavita groaned, leaning his head back and raising his arms in perhaps the most prototypical human gesture of them all--cosmic frustration. "Then who did see? Saw both of you in computer, fighting monsters right out of book." "Book? What book? What the hell are you--" "Knee-Deep in the Dead and Hell on Earth," I answered for the man. "The books that Jill wrote. They're talking about the monsters that the Freds genetically engineered for us on Phobos and Deimos--you know, the spiney imps, steam demons, spiderminds, boneys. All the things that made life worth killing." Arlene stared at me, mouth open. "We were fighting steam demons? In the computer?" The wind was harsh but not strong enough to blow me down again. The driver had cut the speed, now that the Res-men had lifted off in the Disrespect. The guy was a convert named Blinky Abumaha who used to be a fusion technician, damned useful if we were ever going to get off the rock. I stood up, facing toward the front, my face rubbed raw by the mini- gale, kicking up sand so fine it felt like a bad sunburn as it pocked my skin. "Arlene, leave him alone. I think Toku is telling the honest truth. . . . The damned thing really did work." "Come again, Fly-boy? Maybe when you fell out, you landed on your head." "It really did pull our soul out . . . but the Newbies, who are driving this technology revolution, they don't know any kind of soul but their own--the standard soul in the galaxy. They only know the so-called biological soul, like Sears and Roebuck have, the kind that sticks around like a ghost in the body even after death." "You saying we have a different kind of soul?" "It makes sense, doesn't it? A.S., we're the only creatures in the galaxy who can die . . . and we're the only creatures who have anything like faith. Of course our soul works differently!" "So you're saying when they used the machine . . ." Arlene faded away. I turned back, and she had her hand over her mouth, eyes wide behind her goggles. "I think you figured it out," I said softly. "Fly, the machine duplicated our souls! There really is another version of Fly and Arlene out there, and they've got us back fighting the Fred monsters again. Oh Christ, those poor--ah, I was about to say--" "Those poor souls. Go ahead and say it, A.S. It's literally true." She spared me the echo, and I couldn't get more than a grunt out of her all the way back to the Fred ship. In fact, my lance seemed lost in thought, not even staring at the fascinating scenery, klick after klick of barren gray-brown desert, the monotony broken only by sand dunes that flowed visibly across the surface, blown by the wind. The sand was so fine, it acted like a fluid . . . like ocean waves in slow motion. "Bullet for your thoughts," I said, as the gigantic Fred ship, torn into pieces by the crash landing, hove into view. "You can't figure it out?" "I'm not a mind reader, Corporal." "You can't add the Newbie device to Albert and get five?" "Five? Five what?" She shook her head, and I felt like a total idiot. Obviously, she was seeing something, but damned if I could guess what. "Come on, Arlene, you're the sci-fi gal here, not me!" She put her hand familiarly on my knee. "Later, Fly. Okay?" I tried not to think of her hand sliding farther up my leg, but my body refused to cooperate. She must have somehow felt my mood; she removed her hand and snuck a quick glance southward. "Jesus, Fly, what's got into you?" "Just thinking about the shellback initiation on the Bova," I lied. "When you came out in the pasties and g-string, you really gave me a woodie." "Really? Cool." She smiled, then chuckled. "Re- member the look on Albert's face? I thought he was going to call me the Whore of Babylon! 'Get thee behind me, Satan!'" "Hmph. You ought to quote the real Bible, if you have to quote something." "You mean the Catholic Bible?" "Imprimatur, nihil obstat. The very same." "All right, so how does the, ahem, real Bible say it?" "It's not in the real Bible, of course." Arlene rolled her eyes and muttered some dark blasphemy. And then we were there, at the gaping mouth of the Fred ship, the aft end of the final forward piece. Blinky Abumaha drove the hovercraft right inside the crack, forward as far as he could through the wrecked empty cargohold where we had whiled away many simple hours training and shooting at imaginary Freds. Then he parked the car, and we all piled off and started hoofing it forward, "through caverns measureless to man." We pulled short at the first medical lab we found. During the time we had spent on the ship, the weeks heading toward Fredworld, then the weeks we fol- lowed the spoor of the Newbies to this barren place, Sears and Roebuck had finally, reluctantly, showed us a little bit about working the various machines and devices. I wondered if they realized that their own lives would someday depend upon how well they taught, how closely we observed? We slapped their bodies up on a pair of tables, and I took my first really close look since we found them dead in the circle of apostles. One of them--don't ask me which--had a deep but cauterized beam wound across the chest. Cause of death: severe trauma to the left heart, severing of the greater and lesser aortae. The other Klave in the pair had beheld a beam in his own eye. (I had no idea whether anyone else had picked up a mote.) The thin beam fired straight through his retina into the head. "You know," I said, pointing at the wound, "that shouldn't have been fatal." Arlene looked incredulous, so I explained it to her. "Klave don't keep their brains in their heads; it's under the stomach, here." I tapped the point of the triangle formed by the Magilla Gorilla body, just above the stubby legs that could work so fast the human eye couldn't even see them. "Well," she said cautiously, "did he maybe die because the other one died?" I shrugged, nodded. "I can't imagine one dead, one alive; maybe they couldn't either." I felt for pulses in all the most likely spots. Neither gorilla was alive by any test I could think up on the spot. "Come on, you apes," I said, "you wanna live forever?" Only Arlene laughed. I guessed that two hundred years hadn't treated Mr. Heinlein kindly. We folded up the massive arms of the Klave with the heart and aorta damage and shoved him into one of the ma- chines, the one that was supposed to repair the gross physical damage in major organs. If we could get them up and relatively functional, they could proba- bly take over the finer points of surgery themselves, stuff like the eye damage and the numerous burns and ribbon lacerations. The machine looked like a huge chest of drawers, with the bottom drawer big enough for a Fred, which meant nearly enough for a Klave. We managed to stuff the hairy gorilla into the thing anyway, but I was almost at the point of severing one of the arms and letting Sears or Roebuck reattach it later. Fortunately, it didn't come to that. S and R might be totally ice when it came to mutilating bodies, but that wasn't taught in Light Drop Combat Tactics School. I twisted the dials in the upper left drawer to indicate "circulatory system"--the Freds used visual icons, fortunately, since I didn't speak Fredish-- while Arlene cycled through a seemingly endless cata- log of different species, looking for Klave. "Jeez, Fly, there's no end to them! It's like that party scene at the end of that stupid movie, The Pandora Point, where six million different aliens swarm the place, and Milt Kreuger has to make them all cocktails he never heard of." She almost selected one version, but I pointed out that the most distinguishing characteristic of the Klave was that they were always paired. The icon she found showed only a single entity--"you can't tell me the Freds don't know that much about the Klave after six million years of warfare!" So she continued the cycle, and eventually she found the correct species-- as I predicted, even the icon showed them doubled. "Okay, we ready to rock 'n' roll?" I asked. "Hit it, Tiger." I took a deep breath and punched the button marked with a large up-arrow; it turned from blue to yellow. The devil machine began grinding and scrap- ing. I shouldn't have been surprised. It was Fred technology, after all, so of course it sounded like a brake failure at the end of the universe. When the bellows finally stopped pumping and the Jacob's Ladder stopped sparking, the go button turned back to blue. A pale wisp of smoke curled from the bottom drawer, and I heard a muffled yelp. Arlene and I wrestled the drawer open. Inside was a living Klave, blinking rapidly and trying to focus his eyes. Arlene unlatched the side of the drawer, and either Sears or Roebuck tumbled out onto the deck. The overcaptain and the other converts stepped backward at the sight of the mighty Klave. Evidently, they had never seen one this close before we showed up, and they were still nervous about the massive arms, barrel chest, and tiny squirming legs. The patient staggered to his feet, staring around in confu- sion as if looking for something he had lost. He spied it and ran to the other table, making peculiar whimpering noises deep in his throat. He ignored me and everybody else; he had eyes only for the other member of his pair. I started to worry. If this was how Sears (why not?) was going to behave, how were we going to ask him to repair Roebuck? Then a miracle happened. I was getting pretty used to them by then. Sears (if it were he) stared so hard at Roebuck's still form that the latter suddenly sighed, coughed up some blood, and spontaneously came back to life. "Well," I said, "it makes sense in a perverse sort of way: he pined away from loneliness, so now he comes back to life for company." We withdrew, all of us, and allowed the Klave a couple of hours alone together. Overcaptain Tokug- havita kept us riveted with a blow-by-blow account of our mighty battle against the Fred-designed genetic monsters for control of Earth.... I got utterly bored after the first five minutes. Either Jill got everything wrong or the overcaptain's reputation for a steel-trap memory was a PR scam! But Arlene found it fascinat- ing, and respect for an officer, even one who thought I was the Messiah, forced me to sit quietly while he talked and talked and talked and talked. When he finally finished, Sears and Roebuck were fully cured and together again, and I was damned well informed on the subject of my own exploits a couple of centur- ies before. I called a huge conference of all eighteen of us. Sears and Roebuck began formally introducing them- selves; I watched with great amusement while they kept isolating every possible pair of converts (182 possibilities, according to Arlene) and reintroducing themselves, only to be utterly confused when one of the pair would insist they had just met. But I called a halt, so we wouldn't spend the next six years on intros. "Boys--and girls, sorry you three--we're stuck on this rock, and there are two huge problems relating to that: first, unless we want to die here, we have to rescue ourselves; but, second, much more important, we have a mission to accomplish--we have to get after the Resuscitators and stop them from invading Earth, or, failing that, defend Earth from their inva- sion. Any suggestions?" Everyone looked at his brother. At last, Sears and Roebuck gingerly raised a massive arm each. "Um, I can get I know a way up to orbit, but not farther there." "How can you get us up to orbit?" asked Arlene, my personal Doubting Thomas. "You're not saying you can get this pile of dung to fly, are you?" "Certainly not! But I can get I know a way up to orbit, and it's with the escape-ship pod." I frowned. "You mean there's an escape pod on board? Powerful enough to boost us to orbit?" Sears and Roebuck looked at each other, possibly "laughing" at my poor English. Klave were very arrogant about their language ability. But Arlene was stuck in her cynical mood. "What the hell good does that do us? So we can get to orbit-- yippie ki-yay. Then what?" Overcaptain Tokughavita leapt up. "Battle fleet! Can take battle fleet from People Armed to Repel Invasion!" "People armed what? What is that?" "Is moon of this planet; moon is artificial, contains many and many interstellar ships." "Jesus Christ, Toku, why didn't you bother to mention this before?" "No use," he explained. "Fleet inside moon, not on planet surface, like us. Irrelevant." I stood for a long moment, simmering. When I spoke, it was the cold, quiet, reasonable tone of voice that sent shivers up and down Arlene's back. She knew what it meant. "Men, I'm going outside, find a steel ventilation grate, and kick it to shreds. I'll be back shortly." It wasn't just that latest round of idiocy; it was the entire setup. Was there ever anyone more put-upon than I? I found the grating, raised my boot, and gave it about six killer gruesome whacks, like Lizzie Borden with the ax. When I finally limped inside, I felt much better. When I returned, feeling cleansed, I issued the necessary orders: "Sears and Roebuck, get that escape pod ready. Toku, Abumaha, you guys know how to unlock the ships and fire up the engines? Good, get your trash ready, then assist the Klave, if they need it. Arlene, ah, keep an eye on everyone else." "Gee, thanks a lump, Sarge." "That's the price of being a junior non-com. When you get everything ready and you're set to go, you'll find me in the forward engine room, looking for Fred bodies to kick around." The Freds, it turned out, were not as crazy as their architecture suggested. They were very protective of their own safety, like the other races of the galaxy who expected lifespans in the hundreds of thousands or millions of years. In fact, they built life pods into their ships every few hundred meters! We had our choice of not one but three different escape pods, even in the section of Fred ship remaining intact. Sears and Roebuck led the expedition along the outermost corridor of the ship. It was a royal pain: the Fred boat was never meant to sit on the surface of a planet; they figured it would always remain in orbit . . . hence, there was no provision for walking on what amounted to the ceiling of the ship! Everything on the ventral side was smashed beyond repair, of course, by S and R's creative landing, and the dorsal side was all upside down. We jumped and banged at the hatch-open lever for what seemed like forever, and I ended up slipping and cracking my kneecap against a dead light tube that was supposed to descend from the ceiling, but now stuck up from the deck. Finally, S and R reluctantly hoisted Arlene up high, holding her face up against the hatch with their Popeye arms, while she worked all the crap to cycle the now-useless airlock. We hoisted ourselves up and inside. It was a hell of a tight fit; it was meant for about five Freds and was stuffed like a comedy sketch with eighteen of us (including two gigantic Klave, much bigger than the Freds even in their seed-depositing stage). We swarmed over one another like termites; now, if it had been me and seventeen girls, I could get into the possibilities. But I detested making inadvertent con- tact with other males, so I pushed myself into a corner and just observed. Sears and Roebuck clumped up to the driver's seat, walking over people like they were rocks across a stream. They both squeezed into the side-by-side pilot and co-pilot chairs and started flipping levers and twisting dials. The interior was very podlike: spherical, uncom- fortable, dark and metallic, stuffed with nav equip- ment. It smelled like a mixture of machine oil and-- sour lemons! Shades of Phobos and the zombies. One entire end was taken up by a huge bulge poking halfway to the center of the pod--probably the engine cowling. "Preparing yourself for taking immediately off!" Sears and Roebuck warned--and without giving us even a moment to do so, they pushed the button. The whole freaking pod exploded. That's what it felt like when it detached from the ship--a huge gut- wrenching explosion. People and gear flew every- where, and something really hard creased my cheek. Arlene screamed, but it was more a yelp of surprise than pain or agony. We rose like a bullet. As soon as we cleared the ship and started to fall back, Sears and Roebuck rotated the pod and kicked on the chemical rocket engines. They accelerated at only a couple g's, enough to get us moving. My God, but they were loud! My entire body pounded, thumping at the resonant frequency of the frigging engines. I couldn't hear a thing--the noise was beyond hearing. I plugged my ears (everyone did), but it didn't help much. Then the Klave flipped on the big boys, the fusion drive, and we roared away from the desert planet at an even eleven g's. That was the end of my reportage. The humans all passed out, and by the time Sears and Roebuck revived us, we were coasting in zero-g-- my favorite!--in a mini-Hohmann transfer orbit to- ward eventual rendezvous with the tiny artificial moon. Sears and Roebuck piloted like apes possessed, cheerfully informing the assembled multitude that "we should make able the moon just before out of running of reaction mass! Good damn chance!" Their quiet understated confidence was starting to keep me awake nights. 19 We hit the moon at "dawn." Dawn is a location on the moon, not a time. It's tide-locked, so each lunar day is an entire lunar cycle of fourteen days; you can't see the terminator creep, as you can on Earth if you stand on a mountain and look east across a plain (at the equator, the Earth's surface spins at about sixteen hundred kilometers per hour, a thou- sand miles per hour: circumference of the Earth divided by twenty-four). But the moon, smaller than Deimos, had an atmosphere! In the two hundred years since we'd been gone--or a hundred and sixty, actually; the moon was built forty years before and named People Armed to Repel Invasion, henceforth PARI--we humans cracked the secret of the gravity generators we found on Phobos and Deimos, the one final secret of the First Ones that no one else had figured out in millions of years of trying . . . but was it our achievement, or the Newbies'? When did they infect us? PARI had a gravitational acceleration of about 0.4 g, enough to hold a thin breathable atmosphere. God only knew who built the original gravity generators around Sol and the other star systems; it was one of the biggest mysteries about which the Deconstruc- tionists and Hyperrealists were fighting--somehow the cause of the split, or one of the causes, if we could believe Sears and Roebuck! But still, neither Arlene nor I had a clue why . . . something about schools of lit-crit and eleven freaking story fragments. The damned moon was deserted, like a ghost min- ing town in Gold Rush country. "Where are all the people?" I asked. Tokughavita answered, unaware of the volumes his response spoke. "Joined ship when arrived, left with us to surface." He had just admitted that the humans abandoned their post! There was only one reason they would have done that: the crew of the Disrespect had infected them . . . or vice versa. We had to walk slowly across PARI. The atmos- phere was about what it would be three-quarters of the way up Mount Everest, and even a slow walk left me panting and dizzy. The apostles weren't bothered; they said they had been "rebuilt" for greater lung capacity, among other things. Arlene and I exchanged a look. So that was why we'd had such a damned hard time trying to take down Overcaptain Tokughavita! I started to wonder uneasily what their lifespan was: they were super-strong, probably immune to most normal nonintelligent diseases, and engineered to survive on alien worlds . . . and they worshipped me as a God? I hoped I never disappointed them. Men don't take kindly to fallen idols. It felt bizarre to be walking across an artificial moon the size of a cue ball, feeling gravity almost half that of Earth. Directly ahead a couple of klicks was a tall tower. Only the top half was visible over the horizon. The rest of the surface of the moon was a jagged series of black and white stripes, like digital zebra paint; I couldn't see any other structures--but, of course, the entire moon of PARI was one gigantic "structure." We made it to the tower from our touchdown point in just over three hours. The tower was actually three towers connected by numerous spans of metal ribbon--bridges I sincerely hoped I didn't have to pass, since they had no visible guardrails and were plenty far enough up to kill me if I fell, even in the low gravity. "We, ah, don't have to climb up there, do we?" I asked Tokughavita. "Not up," he insisted. "Going down. Going down to battle fleet." "Fly," Arlene said, "you know what those towers are? They're elevators! You can ride them up out of the atmosphere, or most of it.... Am I right, Blinky?" She and the Blink-meister had gotten quite chum- my lately; I was already getting nervous. "Yeah, yeah, right up!" he agreed with sickening enthusiasm. "Go up, fast, fast, make nose bleed!" "Some other time, kids." I felt like my own father twenty years ago. We reached the base of the middle tower, and Tokughavita walked up and--I swear to God!-- pushed the down button to summon the elevator, like it was a high-rise in Manhattan instead of a tiny artificial moon orbiting an alien rock. We waited thirty-five minutes by my watch, while the floor counter slowly climbed through the negative numbers toward zero. When it reached that magic middle, the monstrous doors before us, big enough to drive an upright Delta-19 rocket through on its rolling launch pad, cranked slowly open to admit our party of eighteen. I felt distinctly underdressed; I should at least have been wearing a ten-story robot construction virtu-suit. Tokughavita scanned the array of buttons and finally pushed the one labeled C, with a little icon of a dot in the center of a circle--core, I presumed. My adrenaline level skyrocketed just before we plum- meted. We started descending slowly, but within a minute, we were accelerating downward so close to the gravi- tational pull that our weight slacked off to about one percent of normal, just enough to keep the soles of our boots touching the elevator floor. We dropped sicken- ingly for close to forty-five minutes, so I guess the elevator hadn't been all the way down when we rang for it. At last, we started slowing hard. I was almost kicked to my butt, and Arlene actually did hit the deck with a thud. It was three g's at least! We stopped hard and fast in about five minutes, but we'd been toughened by our ship travels and we didn't black out. Sears and Roebuck took the acceleration in stride, literally: they kept pacing up and back, impatient to see the "battle fleet" that Tokughavita talked about. I figured this must have been close to the normal gravity for a Klave. When the door cranked open, my breath caught in my throat. Before us was a mind-numbingly vast hollow sphere in the center of the moon, so wide in diameter I couldn't begin even to guess its size. It was crisscrossed by hundreds of thousands of striped tubes--catwalks, presumably, connecting different areas. "Beware," said the overcaptain. "Is zero-g beyond elevator. Center of mass." A tube beckoned directly ahead of us. I bravely led the troops forward, my stomach pulling its usual flippy-spinny trick as soon as we left the gravity zone and entered weightlessness. Tokughavita wasn't kidding about the human battle fleet. There were dozens of ships strewn around the inside of the hollow moon, too many to get an accurate estimate. Some were as short as the ship that just took off; others were longer than the Fred ship we'd hijacked to Fredworld. The nearest was about one and a half kilometers long, I reckoned. Blinky Abumaha pointed at it and said, "Damn fast ship that is, nearly fast as ship we left." "Nearly?" I got worried. I knew what that meant. He nodded vigorously. "Damn fast. Get us to Earth only twenty days behind infested ones, counting ac- celeration time, if leave now." Twenty days! I figured that meant about a two-week acceleration up to nearly lightspeed and deceleration to match Earth velocity, assuming the Disrespect could get up to speed and back down in three or four days each way. Jeez, a lot can happen in twenty days; to the Newbies, it may as well be forty years, at the speed they evolved. "All right, ladies and gentlemen, let's haul butt over to the ship and stomp down on the kick-starter." It was an easy "trek" to the nearest ship, provided you had a boatload of patience. Fortunately, that's one lesson you learn double-time in the Corps. No matter how fast we get our butts out of the rack and into our combats, pull on about a ton and a half of armor, lock and load enough ammo to sink a medium-size guided-missile frigate, and bounce out to the helo pad for a quick barf-bump to the rocket, sure as hell some 0-6 forgot his coffee cup or bis inflatable seat cushion, and we have to stand by six or seven hours while everyone from second-louie to short colonel turns the camp upside down trying to find it. You know how to move as quickly as possible along a zero-g tube, don't you? You line yourself up as best you can right down the centerline and give a shove off'n one end. Then you wait. If you're lucky, you get a good long trajectory down the tube until you hit a side wall. If you didn't aim too well, you crash in a couple of dozen meters. Either way, you have to find something solid to brace against and do it again. The stripes along the tubes turned out to be metal bands with footrests to kick off from; somebody was think- ing ahead . . . probably a non-com; an officer wouldn't have the brains. I got used to seeing Pyrex glide past me on all sides, like I was a fish swimming through a glass sewer pipe. It only took us a couple of hours for the first guy, me, to make it all the way to the ship, but we were all spread out, and it took another thirty minutes to get back into a clump. I won't say into a formation, because the "Jetsons"-era clowns under my command didn't even know the meaning of the word. Turned out our little "reindeer games" on the Fred ship were good training. Arlene was especially grate- ful; she shot me a look of thanks when she cleared the transfer tube as "tail-end Charlene." This really wasn't her forte. The ship we picked was long and strangely thin. I worried a bit about feeling cramped since we would be in it for five months. It was shaped basically like a dog bone, a klick and a half long but only a hundred meters in diameter; the endcaps were bulbous, giving the ship that "bone" look: one was the thruster, the other the feeder turbine for the scooped hydrogen. Damn thing was cramped inside. The corridors were mostly crawlways, and they were kept at 0.1 g, according to Blinky Abumaha. The cabins faced off the crawlways, all of them long and squeezed, like a bundle of pencils. Well, what the hell; we were beggars here, shouldn't get choosy. Inside, pale teal predominated with orange trim--a decorator's nightmare. Arlene liked it for some weird reason, possibly just because it was about as far as could be from a Fred ship. I discovered that if I wore red sunglasses, they matted out the blue of the walls, making the effect odd but bearable. We dogpiled into the place and started examining controls, instru- ments, and engines. Six of the fourteen had flown one of these types of ships before, and between them and the networks, we got the engines hot. The only problem was we didn't have anywhere to go! I couldn't see a hole in any direction--and neither could the radar. I grabbed Tokughavita by his uniform lapel. "Okay, smart guy, how do we get out of this thing?" The overcaptain rubbed his chin. "Was afraid would ask question. Not sure, must consult mil-net." He typed away at a console for a while, frowning deeper and deeper. By the time another hour had passed, I had to forcibly restrain him from ripping the terminal out with his bare hands and heaving it through the computer screen. The damned thing was command and menu driven--and Tokughavita didn't know the query command and couldn't find it on any of a hundred menus! Arlene and I went on a hunt, trying to find the rest of our crew, who had scattered to the four winds, pawing through every system on the ship to find the stuff they knew. I snagged eight and Arlene got the rest, but no one had a clue where a tunnel was or how to open it up if we found it. They had all flown on these sorts of ships before, but none of my platoon was a starship pilot! I cursed the miserable Res-men for not being soft-hearted enough to leave us Ninepin at least! Traitor or not, he was a useful font of intel. I dismissed most of them and called a conference with Arlene, Tokughavita, the engineer Abumaha, and Sears and Roebuck. "Boys--and you, too, A.S.-- there must be some kind of emergency exit here, just in case the worst-case scenario happened, and we had to deploy everything on hand immediately. Is there a set of instruction manuals, help systems, officer- training course . . . anything?" Everyone shook his head. "I haven't seen a damned thing," Arlene said, "and I've been looking." "The designers wouldn't probably let such datums loose in the ships, in the event to enemy capture," Sears and Roebuck suggested with entirely inappro- priate cheer. I guessed they were happy so long as no one was shooting at them, or likely to do so in the foreseeable future. We kicked it around a bit, and everyone agreed we were all ignoramuses. Very productive meeting. Now I knew why officers got the big bucks. But something had been tickling the back of my brain through the whole useless disaster, something somebody had said. I ran back the conversations in my mind . . . and abruptly I realized it was something I'd said: I'd mentioned Ninepin. If only we had him--he knew everything, though his loyalty was a bit questionable! "Arlene, you remember what Ninepin said about how long it took to build him?" "Now that you bring it up, I think it was something ridiculous, like four or five hours, wasn't it? Fly, you're not thinking of trying to build another one . . . are you?" We stared at each other, struck by the same thought. "Toku, you remember that big green ball that followed us around?" I asked. "What was that?" From across the table, the overcaptain, who had zoned out and was looking out a porthole and picking his teeth, jerked back to attention. "Big green ball? Oh, yes, was Data Pastiche. Had it installed, hoped would pick up information about ancient human culture." "Yeah, yeah, and it reported back to the Res-men about us. Are these Data Pastiches common? Would we find one on this ship, maybe?" Tokughavita shook his head. "Never saw before. Was prototype. Never used, don't know how." "Who would know?" "Man who built." I sighed in exasperation. "Well, who else, since the man who built it isn't here?" Tokughavita looked puzzled.