st have been light panels or LEDs or something; I don't know where the illumination came from . . . there was no source that we ever found. We invented a few reindeer games to play when we got tired of training, marching, and drilling. (I made sure Arlene and I kept up on our parade and close- order drill; we may have been lost in space, but we were still the United States Freaking Marine Corps, Goddamn it!) One Arlene got from an old sci-fi book by Heinlein: you start at one end of the corridor and "dive" toward the other end, doing flips or spins or butterflies or some other gymnastic feat, seeing how far you can get and how many maneuvers you can perform before you crash against the side. She never did get all the way, but after the first couple of weeks, I always did, much to Arlene's annoyance. I thought Sears and Roebuck would be too staid and respectable to join in any reindeer games. Hah! They were always the first to get tired of the milspec crap and demand we go play. I guess decadence is more than anything else the need to play games to drive away the boredom demon. Having demonstrated their insanity by volunteer- ing to go on our expedition, far from any possibility of resurrection if they should "die," Sears and Roebuck proved their fearlessness in the risks they would take just for a thrill. Once, they put on space suits from their fanny packs, climbed outside the ship, and played like monkeys on the outer skin! They dangled from the spinning hull, swinging from handhold to handhold with their feet dangling over an infinite abyss--one slip, and we would have lost one, if not both, of our pilots. Probably if one had gone, the other would have been unable to contemplate living and would have followed the first loyally to a horrible doom. But all good things must end. The time rolled by at last, and Sears and Roebuck suddenly turned deadly serious. We shut down the ramscoop, and I felt a slight gravity push for'ard as we plowed into inter- stellar hydrogen-dust and slowed. We did this for about a week, then Sears and Roebuck started the thrusters at a lower and more efficient level of acceler- ation than what our ship originally had planned. It made no difference to us; it was still far beyond the fatal crushing level, so the inertial dampers kept it down to the same level we had felt ramping up. Our reindeer games stopped; we had no more zero-g shaft. Suddenly heavy again after weeks of acceleration ranging from 0.8 g down to zero, I dragged every footstep, and my legs and back ached. Arlene didn't have it so bad, since she didn't mass as much as I; she still had a spring in her step and an increasingly grim smile on her face. I knew the feeling; it had been months since I killed anything. After what the Freds had done to my life and my world, I developed the taste for blood. Now that the Newbies had deprived me of my rightful revenge, I was prepared to transfer all that wrath to the new threat. In short, I wanted to pump a few rounds into a nice, smooth Newbie chest. But I was also starting to get very, very nervous about what they had managed to evolve into in the four decades they had been down on the planet we approached--assuming they were still there. I saw a number of possible outcomes, none of them pleasant: the frustration of finding no one, the humiliation of capture, the agony of us being annihi- lated. Then without warning one day, the reactor braking suddenly stopped, sending Arlene and me flying (liter- ally, the for'ard bulkhead that had been a deck became a wall instantaneously, dropping us to the outer bulkhead, which now was our only "floor"!). "We're coming in down to landing," Sears and Roe- buck soberly informed us, then used the last of the hydrogen peroxide retros over the space of an hour to cut the ship's rotation, leaving us in an orbit that would take us directly into the planet's atmosphere ... at about mach seventy (that's Earth sea-level, dry- air mach speed of seventy, about twenty-three kilome- ters per second). Trying to land at such a speed would kill us as surely as blowing up the reactor pile. But we were rapidly running out of options: when Sears and Roe- buck killed the main thrusters, they did so with only a tiny bit of LOX remaining. "How much we got left?" Arlene asked. "Approximately it is left 650 seconds is," they answered, "but only at three gravities of Fredworld for using the maneuvers rockets." Arlene and I looked at each other; that was less than eleven minutes of burn, and without even using the huge main thrusters! Arlene tapped rapidly on her wrist calculator, frowned, and tried the calculation again. "S and R," she said, broadcasting through her throat mike into the ship's radio communication system. "I get a net drop of about mach fifty." "That is correct in essential." Arlene lowered her orange brows and spoke slowly, like a child answering what she thinks might be a trick classroom question. "Sears and Roebuck, if we're doing mach seventy now, and we drop by mach fifty, doesn't that mean we're still doing mach twenty?" "Yes. The math are simplicity." Now we both looked back and forth in confusion. I took over the interrogation, now that I understood the situation: "S and R, you braindead morons, we'll still be splattered across the deck like a boxload of metal- lic atoms!" Long pause. Maybe they were manipulating each other's head in that faintly obscene form of laughter the Klave use. "No my childrens, but for we shall use air-braking to reduceify the rest of the speed." A terrible pit opened in my stomach. Even I knew that the Fred ship was not, repeat not, designed to be abused in such a fashion. It was designed to dock with a pinwheel launcher and even to land gently using the main thrusters to slow all the way to next to nothing . . . not to belly-flop into the atmosphere like a disori- ented diver, burning off excess speed by turning its huge surface area directly into the onrushing air! We would burn to a crisp. That is, if the ship didn't tear itself into constituent parts first. "Hang on to yourselves and things," suggested our mondo-weird, binary pilots. "We're burning away the fuel starting now." 7 The ship jerked, shimmied like a garden hose, jerked again. "Where the hell's that crazy mofo?" I demanded. Arlene was knocked away from her perch by anoth- er sudden "earthquake." I caught her by the arm, so she didn't carom across the zero-g ship. "Christ! I think he said he was headed toward Nav Room One, right inside the engine compartment!" The ship twirled like a chandelier, or so it felt; we dangled from handholds, feeling sudden acceleration trying to yank us free to fling us into God knows where. Nearly eleven minutes later, the acceleration vanished as abruptly as it began. Sears and Roebuck finished the final burn. We were dead-sticking it the rest of the way in, and that would be the end of the Fred ship--and possibly of us, too. Then the atmosphere thickened enough that we started feeling a real push; the bow of the ship became "down," the stern "up." I drifted against the for'ard bulkhead, now floor, with about 0.2 g, which quickly escalated to full, then more than full gravity. Two, three times our normal g! The inertial dampers were offline, probably out of juice; we suffered through the full deceleration phase. Four g's, four and a half. The air-braking went on forever. I was crushed to the deck by about eight hundred pounds of weight! Then the gravity began to slide along the deck toward the ventral bulkhead. Sears and Roebuck were pitch- ing the nose upward to expose more of the hull to the atmosphere. We shed airspeed even as we gained more weight. I heard a horrific explosion astern of us--the ship swerved violently, hurling us across the new floor! Arlene fell against me, but I was stunned. I shook my head. "What the freaking hell--!" She stared out a porthole, face ashen. "Jesus, Fly! Freakin' ship splitting!" She slid her hand along the deck and pointed. I just barely saw a huge piece of the Fred ship below us, tumbling end over end, shattering into "tiny" splinters scores of meters long. It was getting hard to talk. We needed all our breath to bear down, forcing blood back into our heads. Thank God we were lying down--at now six g's, sitting up we might have passed out. I knew what was happening: the Fred ship, strong as it was, was never intended to burn through the atmosphere like this! It was fracturing along heat seams, separating into the components that had been attached by the Freds when they assembled the vehicle, probably in orbit. The damned thing was way too long for this sort of monkey crap. "Forward!" I shouted, nearly blacking out with the effort. Arlene stared, confused--lack of oxygen- bearing blood in her brain, maybe--so I repeated, "Forward! Nav Room One!" If any component of the ship was to survive the fiery reentry, it would be the biggest, strongest section--the decks and compartments where the en- gines actually burned, shook, and vibrated. Besides, if that section went, we would all die anyway--no pilot! We weren't far from it, maybe a couple of hundred meters. But it was a marathon! Arlene strained and slithered forward, like a snake; I tried to follow suit, but the best I could do was a humping motion that wrenched my back something fierce. God, to be young again, and supple. The monstrous gravity squeezed us to the ventral deckplates like an enormous boot stamping on our backs. Each compartment was con- nected to the next by a flexible rubber bottleneck that could easily be sealed to isolate a puncture. The rubber mouths became jaws of death, smothering and suffocating us as we wriggled through them. We could have used some petroleum jelly; I had plenty . . . about a kilometer behind us in my seabag. After the first four rooms, my muscles were so sore I grunted with pain with every meter crawled. Arlene was crying; I'd almost never seen her cry before, and never from sheer physical pain. It scared me--the world was ending! The groans from the ship as it tore itself apart sure as hell sounded like the end of the world, the universe grinding down noisily . . . long drawn-out moans, a loud noise like the cry of a humpbacked whale, shrieks and sobs, the wailing of the damned in hell, gnashing their teeth. The devil himself danced around me in hooves and pointed tail, laughing and capering, pointing at me in my mortal distress. Or was it a hell prince minotaur? A horrible hallucination; my Lord, I surely did see him, in flesh of red and reeking of sulphur and the grave. Then a steam demon and a boney leapt through the walls! Old home week for Fred monsters! But I knew where salvation lay, for'ard, for'ard to Nav Room One. When Arlene faltered and tried to lie down and die in front of me, I put my hand on her flattened derriire and shoved with a strength I'd never felt before. The handful of ass moved ahead, dragging the girl along with it. Another four rooms, only two left. My belly and chest were scraped raw, and my groin ached with the agony of a well-placed jackboot. Spittle ran down my chin, smearing on the deck and dehydrating me. We suffered under a full eight g's then, according to my wrist accelerometer, and even my eyeballs throbbed with pain, horribly distended toward the deck. Color had long since disappeared, and even the black and white images I could still see narrowed to a tunnel of light. Blurry outlines bent and twisted under the force. Again, the ship skewed, spun out of control until Sears and Roebuck regained control. How the hell were they flying the ship? Were there even any control surfaces left? We shoved through the last two rubber collars; I almost died in the second when my bulk stuck fast, and I couldn't breathe for the clingy seal across my mouth and nose. Arlene saved my life then, reaching back into the bottleneck, somehow mustering the strength to drag me forward by my hair a meter, clearing the rubber from my face. At last, we lay on the floor of Nav Room One, broken and bleeding from nose and ears, unable to see, hugging the deck like drunks at the end of a spree. I heard sounds above the shredding of the ship behind us, words--Sears and Roebuck saying some- thing. Desperately, I focused. "Being--shot." They gasped. "Shot at down--defenders shooting--ship breaking into part--loosing controlling." Shot? Shot at? What the hell was this outrage? It was just too much, on top of the agony of reentry, to have to put up with this weaponry BS as well! "Kill-- bastards," I wheezed. Ho, fat chance; more likely, we would all die before the ship even hit the ground-- blown apart by relentless defenders with particle- beam cannons. I passed out, only for a moment; I woke to hear Sears and Roebuck repeating over and over, "Dirt alert! Dirt alert!" I opened my eyes, focused just long enough to see the ground rushing up like a freight train, then went limp and dark again. I composed my epitaph: Goodbye, cruel alien world. Sears and Roebuck must have flared out at the last moment, for I felt the nose rise majestically. Then the remaining tail section of the Fred ship, whatever was left, struck the ground with particular savagery, and the ship slammed belly-first into what turned out to be silica sand. A miracle that proved my faith--had it been granite or water, we would have been atomized. We were still traveling at least mach four when we painted the desert, and we plowed a twenty-seven- kilometer furrow across the surface of the planet, kicking up sandy rooster tails taller than the Buchan- an Building in the forty seconds it took us to slide to a stop. When the landing was over, we lay on the deck panting and gasping. Sears and Roebuck were out; they were used to a lot heavier gravitation than we, but that shock was a bit much even for them, being seated in the pilot's chair. The ship's safety proce- dures performed as advertised, shedding pieces of ship well back over the horizon to dissipate the energy, while protecting the for'ard compartments of the ship, where the most precious intelligent cargo would have clustered. Arlene was already sitting up on her butt when I awoke; her head was back as she tried to staunch a pretty bad nosebleed. I tasted a lot of blood, but it was a few seconds before I realized I had lost my left, upper, outermost incisor. I vaguely looked for it, still somewhat groggy, but it was nowhere to be seen. I started to blink back to conscious awareness. Arlene saw that I was awake. Without lowering her head, she croaked, "I guess--that wasn't--the world's greatest landing." Holding my jaw, which had started to throb, I had time to mutter a Marine definition: "A good landing is anything you walk away from." Then the pain really hit me all over, and I was busy gritting my teeth and stifling screams until Arlene kindly injected me with a pain suppressor and stimulant from her combat ar- mor medipouch. Sears and Roebuck woke up, little the worse for wear. "Shall we to outgo and face the new brave world?" they cheerfully asked. It was the closest I'd ever come to fragging two of my own men. 8 "Livable?" asked Arlene, her voice hoarse and painful to hear. Sears and Roebuck grunted. "Justice a minute, justice a minute." They tapped at several keys on the command console, hmming and humming as the few sensors that had not burned off in the crash sampled the air, the radiation levels, the temperature, and looked for any dangerous bacteria, viruses, molds, or other microorganisms. "Not to kill," they announced at last. "Healthy?" I gasped. "Not to kill." Their irritating evasiveness put me on my guard, but what could we do? The ship's air seal was rup- tured, and we soon would be sucking down Skin- walker's air, whether we wanted to or not. The machinery that manufactured the nutrition pills was back a kilometer in the ship and was probably smeared across the landscape. So we would soon enough be eating local food and drinking local water, if there was any--or dying of thirst and hunger. Our combat suits would serve as a limited shield against radiation, but they would only mitigate, not negate the ill effects. For good or ill, we were cast upon the shores of Skinwalker, offered only wayfarer's bounty. God, how poetic. We would either be able to digest the local produce or die trying. We picked ourselves up off the floor, painfully peeling the deckplates away from our skin. Arlene wasn't hit as hard as I--less mass per surface area. Our armor was pounded hard, protective value proba- bly compromised but still better than zip. Despite their chipper words, Sears and Roebuck had a hard time peeling themselves out of the command chair (which had survived remarkably intact). Arlene let me lean on her shoulders, and our pilots supported each other, as we limped to the emergency hatch. I pulled the activation lever. Explosive bolts blew outward, taking the hatch cover with them. Shaking, we climbed down the ladder, two hundred meters or more. It was a straight shot, not staggered the way human ladders generally are: if one of us were to slip.... I nervously watched Sears and Roebuck above me, but I shouldn't have worried; their legs may have been ridiculously short, but they were powerful--all due to the high gravity of the Klave homeworld. Arlene and I were more likely to slip and fall in the relatively modest gravity of the planet, about 0.7 g. The world looked like the Mojave Desert, or maybe we just happened to land in a desert area. I hadn't gotten much of a look during the crash. I looked up. The sky was too pale, but I saw oddly square clouds, almost crystalline; we had weather, evidently. Bend- ing down, grimacing, I lifted a handful of sand: the grains were finer than Earth sand, fine enough that I decided Arlene and I should wear our biofilters; really, really fine silica can clog up your alveolae and give you something like Black Lung Disease. There- after, we spoke through throat mikes into our "loz- enge" receivers. I don't know what Sears and Roe- buck did when I pointed out the problem; they had their own radio. The brownish gray sandscape depressed me. Under a pale sky, the only spots of color were the green and black of our standard-issue combat suits and Sears and Roebuck's muted orange flightsuits, which they had worn ever since the mission began. Everything else was the color of dingy gray socks that hadn't been washed in a month. "Okay, S and R, what the hell did you mean about us being shot at?" My tongue couldn't help exploring the new hole in my mouth, where the tooth had been; the hole still throbbed, but the sharp pain was gone. Gotta get S and R to fix this, I promised. "Meaned what was said; they were firing at us shots from cannons." "Energy weapons, artillery shells, what?" Extract- ing usable information from Sears and Roebuck was worse than sitting through a briefing by Lieutenant Weems--may he rest in peace for a good long time. "Were firing the slugs from the electromagnabetic accelerating gun." "Um, a rail gun?" asked Arlene, picking up on the answer faster than I. Anything to do with exotic technology or weaponry was A.S.'s subject--she could lecture for hours on ogre tanks and orbiting "smart spears," and she sometimes did. "Yes, the rail gun," confirmed Sears and Roebuck. I sort of knew what a rail gun was: you took slugs of depleted uranium, encased them in a ferromagnetic shell casing, and accelerated them to several kilome- ters per second velocity using electromagnets. The resulting "gun" could damn near put shells into orbit--they moved so fast, they punched through any sort of imaginable armor like a bullet through thin glass. It was a horrific weapon we had never been able to make work properly. The first shot always de- stroyed the target, but generally also our rail-gun prototype! I licked dry lips. If the enemy--Newbies or Freds?--could build a tactical-size version, our com- bat armor would be utterly useless; if we ever took a shot, we'd be toast. The desert was evidently deserted; but the solitude did not begin to compare to the vast loneliness of the starry void. I stared at the desolation, taking some comfort in the feel of ground beneath my feet, the breath of wind against my armor. The air smelled tangy--ozone--but so far I was breathing all right. "Hey S and R," I called, softly under such a sky, "is that ozone from our ship, or is it natural to the atmosphere?" "We didn't detect it orbitally," they answered in unison. I shrugged. If any of us had asthma, it might have been a problem. But I never had any, Arlene's was cured by the doctors at NAMI, and Sears and Roebuck could take care of themselves. "Which way toward the dinks who were shooting at us?" Arlene asked. Sears and Roebuck turned slowly through the entire 360-degree panorama, then pointed basically along the twenty-seven kilometer trench our ship had dug. Arlene turned to me, raising her brows like a pair of question marks. Toward or away from danger? Didn't seem to be much of a choice. S and R had detected no signs of civilization on the planet--no powerlines, power- plants, canals, or structures larger than two or three stories. If there was anything smaller, it wouldn't have shown up on their quick microwave scan. So far as I could tell, the only sign of intelligent life was the gun battery that had pounded our ship into rubble. Oh, what the hell! "Let's at least eyeball the wogs and see who they are. My guess is they don't belong here any more than we do." The air temp on the desert Arlene dubbed the Anvil of God was livable; Sears and Roebuck hadn't lied. But they never claimed it was comfortable ... and 60 degrees centigrade certainly didn't qualify. Our helmets kept the direct sunlight off our heads, and we had several days' worth of water if we used the recirc option, pissing into a tube and recycling it back to the drinking nipple. Arlene was not happy about doing that. Being a female, this meant she had to strip and pee into a bedpanlike device, whereas I just wore a sheath. There were no trees, so no privacy. She could have turned her back, but in a typical act of defiance, A.S. just did it right in front of me and the Klave. I pretended nonchalance, as if women urinated in front of me all the time--Arlene had done it before, anyway, in combat situations. But in reality I was shocked and embarrassed every damned time ... but I sure wasn't about to let Arlene know that! I would never hear the end of it. We cut off the furrow about two klicks laterally and paralleled it, figuring that whoever was shooting at us would follow the skidmarks to see what he had shot down. The armor monitored the outside air, regulat- ing heat venting to prevent us showing a hot signature on an infrared optical device, and we kept the mikes cold and ultrashort range--outside of five to seven meters, the fuzzy signal attenuated into the back- ground noise. We had a reasonably good chance of not getting caught, and, damn it, I wanted to see those bastards with their itchy trigger fingers, see them up close and personal! We had passed directly over the battery about fifty klicks back; the journey would take us at least two days and some . . . but after only ten kilometers, we ran into a scouting party from the wogs driving some kind of land cart. Not literally ran into--we picked them up when they were still five klicks range, track- ing directly along our ship's wake. Trusting to our electronic countermeasures, we loped toward them until we were within half a klick; at that point, we dropped to our bellies and crawled the remaining distance, while the bad guys broke for lunch. Arlene and I were both hungry, but we were rationing our Fred food . . . and especially our Fred- pills. We got within a hundred meters, easily within range of my M-14 BAR and the lever-action .45- caliber rifle that Arlene toted for those occasions where a shotgun just wouldn't do. We watched them through our scopes, trying to figure out who they were. They looked oddly human, but their heads and bodies were covered by thick pressure suits that might have had battlefield capability. Their proportions were humanoid. There were four scouts and one supervisory type with a notepad built into his wrist armor; I can smell an officious, jerky sergeant a klick off. "Sarge," Arlene said faintly over the radio, "there's no cover, and we can pop most of them before they burrow into the sand. We can take them before they know what hit; they might not even get off a mes- sage." I hesitated--not a good move for a battlefield non- com, but sometimes you really don't have enough intel. "Hold your fire, A.S. Let's see if we can hear them first." I programmed my electronic ears to scan sequen- tially all sixty-four million channels, looking for any- thing non-random; I caught a few tiny bursts of information, but nothing that lasted longer than 0.02 seconds, according to the log. "You pick up any- thing?" I asked. "Fly, I'm getting bursts of pattern from channel 23- 118-190 that last about 0.02; they all last just that long. You seeing that?" "Now that you mention it--" "I think whoever they are, they use much narrower frequency channels than we use; we're kind of scan- ning past them by scanning up and down within the channel. Let me small this thing down and just scan up and down at that freq. Stand by." I would have done the same thing, except I hadn't exactly paid attention during my techie classes in radio-com. I waited, fuming, while Arlene made the necessary software adjustments. I kept the aliens in my scope, following their progress up the "road" formed by our long skid to rest. Finally, she finished tapping at her wrist and came back to me. "Here, plug into me." I fitted my female connector over her wrist prongs. A couple of seconds later, I started hearing what obviously were words in recognizable sentences. There was something damnably familiar about the rhythms and pauses in the speech; I was sure I had heard it before. Even the words sounded tantalizingly close to something I could understand--a little clear- er than Dutch, I reckoned. If I strained, I could almost make out what they were saying. I realized with a chill that there was no almost about it: I did understand them--they were speaking English! But it was a harsher, colder kind of English, peppered with utilitarian gruntlike words I had never heard. I could even tell who was speaking by the odd mannerisms they used when they made a point. Now that I knew they were human, I could even see their body-language expressions, though they held them- selves with a studied limpness that irritated me. With omissions, I heard an exchange between the sergeant and one of the scouts. "Are [new word] [new word]-destroyed ship?" "Carried it [new word], sub-sir. Saw it [new word]." "Was Fred; pattern-match was [new word], old ship from [new word]. Should have [new word]-shot back. Don't like this; something [new word]." "[New word]-circle around impact [new word] and [new word] from another-different quarter?" "Power emissions? Moving infrareds? Radio or radioisotope?" "[New word], sub-sir. [New word] dead cold." "Don't [new word] circle. Approach [new word] but cautiously." I could follow the conversation despite missing every third or fourth word; they debated whether we had been destroyed or not. Their voices were distant and cold, as if they were discussing an advertising campaign instead of a military campaign. They sounded totally dispassionate, like perfect soldiers. I tried to hate them because of what they had done to us, shooting us down and nearly killing us all. But I just couldn't. Right or wrong, they were ours, and Marines always believe in pulling a buddy out of the crossfire. Besides, they had obviously thought we were Freds. Arlene gripped my upper arm so intensely she left indentations that would probably remain for hours. Evidently she figured it out the same time I did. We didn't talk. Knowing they were English-speaking hu- mans made us too nervous even to rely on the short effective range of our mikes. I spoke to her in hand signals: Circle around, isolate one, capture alive. I wanted to get that sergeant. I pointed to the stripes on my left shoulder, and Arlene nodded. But before she could move out, the prey moved away--on foot this time. We paralleled them, following them back the way we had come. Arlene and I skulked, but Sears and Roebuck simply walked normally--I made them fol- low about two hundred and fifty meters back and hoped they had decent infrared jamming. I was desperately hungry for the sergeant, but when one of the humans fell behind, it was one of the scouts instead. Well, if beggars were horses, choosers would wish. Around other side, I signed to Corporal Sanders. She shuffled silently through the sand, cutting around behind the straggler. Three, I signaled, two, one, now! Arlene and I charged forward from the dink's left and right rear quarters, tackling him before he ever saw us. I pushed my forearm against his throat and leaned hard, cutting off any sound he might try to make, while Arlene ripped away every wire and fiberoptic cable she could find. The prisoner stared at me, eyes as big as dinner plates. He clawed at my arm, trying to pull it loose so he could suck in a breath of air, but I wasn't budging. Arlene ran her receiver antenna all across his body, along every limb, and even up his crotch. She found two transceivers, two tiny fragile nodules sewn inside his uniform; she plucked them free and destroyed them by crushing them between thumb and middle finger. I let loose on his throat, just in time; he sucked in huge lungfuls of air, trying to breathe through the ozone. I grabbed him under his arms, Arlene got his feet, and we ran, carrying him between us, for about half a klick. We pushed him into the dust and lay next to him; Arlene cuffed him with a plastic tie, while I lay across him and watched his pals through the scope. It took them another two hundred meters before they real- ized he had been picked off; they backtracked, but by then the fickle wind had blown the ultrafine sand around, obliterating our tracks. As they began to fan out for a spiral search, calling him repeatedly over the radio, A.S., Sears and Roebuck, and I withdrew far from the canyon carved by the Fred ship ... and even that gouge was filling, starting to be hard to spot. At two kilometers directly perpendicular to our trail, I called a halt. I figured we were far enough along that they weren't likely to find us anytime soon, now that we had destroyed all of the prisoner's electronic tells ... we hoped. I knelt down next to the guy. He looked vaguely Mongolian and vaguely Mediterranean, a perfectly normal human with black hair and dark brown eyes, dark-complected, with slight Oriental folds over his eyes. But from when? How far advanced was he over us? We had left Earth some three or four hundred years ago; I wasn't really sure of the conversion factor. But when did he leave? I drew my boot knife and rested it alongside his neck. "Chill, brother," I said, then thought better of it. Language had evidently changed in several centuries--best to avoid expressions as much as possible, stick to basic English. "We are humans," I said, indicating Arlene and myself. "We need infor- mation. Why are you here?" The moment he felt my knife, the prisoner relaxed. He seemed resigned to his fate, whether it was death or release. He listened intently, then nodded a few seconds after I finished. "Yes," he said, with a strange pronunciation of the vowel--it came out like Yauz. "No, you do not understand," I persisted. "Why are you here?" "Yes . . . we--came from--Earthground planet." "I can tell." "Cut the crap!" Arlene snarled. I drew my finger across my throat, and she shut up. "What was the reason for you to come?" I tried again. My prisoner seemed only too eager to talk-- something which always sets off alarm bells in my head. I mean, why should he want to help us? "Yes. We have arrived [unintelligible] to chase." "What are you chasing?" "[New word]. Aliens. When come you from?" I told him the year we left, and his brows shot up instantly. He didn't take time to calculate what that was in dog years, so I presumed when he left people still used the same calendar we did. "Taggart, Sand- ers," I said, introducing us. "They are Sears and Roebuck, but don't ask me which is which." Or even if that concept had meaning to the binary Klave. "Josepaze Papoulhandes [new word] Fine [new word]." "Josepaze?" He looked down for a moment; it was ritualized, and I figured it probably meant what nodding your head meant in our time. "Josepaze, what aliens did you chase here?" He struggled, obviously trying to avoid any new expressions that would confuse me. I was still suspi- cious of his level of cooperation, but he seemed to have given up any concern about his duty, his unit, even his own life; it was like everything had lost all meaning, now that I had a blade against his carotid artery. I was used to people relaxing if they thought they were about to die, but this was entirely too apathetic. "Aliens . . . evolve fast," he said at last. "Con- quered Earth--killed--left--followed here." Arlene and I looked up at each other, and I swal- lowed hard. Newbies? How the hell had they gotten all the way to Earth and back? An evil chill settled across my back and camped there for the night. 9 The evil ice that gripped me around my lower back was a premonition of horrors to come. While I straddled that doofus, holding my commando knife to his throat and wondering why in hell he didn't make even a pretense of resisting the interrogation, I sud- denly noticed an unaccustomed quiet. I looked up. "Lance--what aren't I hearing?" She stared around, puzzled. "Where the freak are those freaks, Sears and Roebuck?" The Klave, binary to the root, never managed to keep perfectly silent; all the stray little thoughts that run through a human's head run back and forth between the two parts of a Klave pair, either spoken directly out loud or at least subvocalized. They never stopped! It got on my nerves for the first few weeks I knew them, then I pretty much forgot all about it, never even noticing when they muttered back and forth to each other. Just as I couldn't tell Sears from Roebuck, if that concept even made sense--did they have separate names? I didn't think they did, Sears and Roebuck being the single name of the single pair--I couldn't tell one voice from the other. Even- tually I dismissed all the muttering like I would a Marine who just couldn't stop mumbling to himself. I hushed them when necessary for an ambush; other- wise, I ignored it as their unique craziness. Maybe it was ordinary among Klave; maybe they were consid- ered loony even among others of their kind. . . . Hell, I knew they were! They volunteered to accompany us, far away from anyone to resurrect them if they died. I didn't notice the constant rumbling until it sud- denly vanished, replaced by the eerie silence of the uninhabited planet we all hunted across for trace of the Newbies. The sifting sand was so fine, it made no whisper as one grain brushed another, and there were no trees to sigh in the persistent wind. Every sound from Arlene and me was magnified a thousand times by the surrounding silence.... I should have heard Sears and Roebuck if they were half a klick away! "Where the hell did they . . . ?" Arlene and I stared around wildly. I felt the prick of eyeballs on the back of my neck whichever way I turned. Long ago, I learned to trust my Fly-stinct: I pointed to my own eyes, then hooked a thumb over my shoulder. Arlene nodded, picked up her lever-action, and braced it against the crook of her arm. The bastard must've had a homing device we couldn't pick up with our own receivers. I knew it couldn't be that easy! But where the hell were they? I planted my boot on the prisoner's chest and stared past Arlene. We each took half the clock. I glanced down at the human; he wasn't going anywhere, so I lifted my foot and slid sideways to get a better scan. My foot slipped in the sand, and my heart stopped-- but I recovered my balance with the loss only of my dignity. Arlene kept the .45 against her chest, ready to rock 'n' roll, but not up to her eye; she didn't want to start focusing on sand dunes or heat reflections and miss something move. I knew my rifle was cocked with a round in the chamber, but I had an almost irresistible urge to run the bolt once more. I fought down the compulsion--last thing I wanted was to look nervous in front of my "man." I should have worried instead about looking dead. I heard the crack of the firearm exactly the same moment I felt the kick in the back of my vest--not quite a perfect shot, a little high, but with a rifle, you don't need to be perfect. The round delivered enough energy to kick me forward onto my face and send my own M-14 flying into the sand, where it promptly buried itself. It didn't matter. I was too busy fighting blackness and the pain in my shoulder, which even in my state I could tell was blown all to hell, to worry about grabbing for my gun. Dim and distant, I heard Arlene's rifle barking again and again as she sprayed the area where the shot had come from. Then she went down hard, but held on to her piece. I guess the shot that hit me must have snuck right past my armor to take out my left shoul- der. I rolled over onto my right side to get away from the pain, but it followed me, and blood dribbled across my helmet faceplate. This was bad, really bad. I'd never been shot this bad before--isn't that per- verse? First time, on a planet a hundred light-years or more from Earth, in the desert sand, with only my loving friend Lance Corporal Arlene Sanders to watch me die on foreign shores. Now I was babbling. Maybe A.S. wouldn't be seeing anything anyway. She was down pretty bad, too--not enough to stop shooting, but I figured she was aiming by instinct now. Our prisoner was screaming in utter terror, louder even than Arlene's rifle. Jesus, what a weenie. Show some freaking backbone, take it like a man! Arlene took it like a man. She couldn't see for crap because she'd taken another shot, this one off the faceplate of her helmet, cracking it like a spiderweb. Must have missed her brain because she held her .45 rifle up and tried to shoot over me. She couldn't see.... I kept telling myself she couldn't see, even when one of her shots hit me in the freaking hip. I didn't even feel it by then--I was screaming myself now, screaming about all the evil crap I was going to do to the sons of bitches who were plinking us from God knows where, to them and their freaking mothers and fathers and sons and daughters and neighbors--and burn all their houses down and sow their fields with salt. Arlene was screaming, "Fly Fly Fly," letting fly until she burned right through the mag. The precious red stuff poured out of my uniform now, finding the cracks in the armor. Arlene took one in the belly, and even with the flak jacket, she doubled over gasping and sucking for air. Just before I went black to cross the River Styx with pennies on my eyes, I felt hands grab me by the bad arm and yank me over, and I think I screamed with pain again, but I couldn't match the utterly terror-stricken shrieks of the prisoner. God what a wiener. So long, Arlene; so long, Fly Taggart; Semper fi, Mac; it sure was nice to wear the eagle and anchor for so many years. Damn, was I glad to die a sergeant instead of a corporal. I drifted through black stormclouds, feeling like I was falling endlessly backward, dizzy with vertigo. I kept jerking, trying to jerk awake, like you do when you're in a horrid nightmare and you know you're just under the surface between sleep and wake, dark dementia and the cold light of dawn--but I just couldn't do it. I hovered there grabbing for the surface, but it was just out of my grasp. My brain wouldn't reboot. I felt the pain, but from the out- side. . . . When I was a kid, I used to watch the X- rated pictures over at the Covergirl Drive-In; I could see them from a treetop in the woods between our farmhouse and the town of Bartleston. I couldn't hear the sound and the picture was shaky in my binoculars, but there it was, sex on the screen, bigger than I ever wanted real life to be. That was