from the stern, we found it--we found our first, and only, Newbie body. Arlene saw something and jogged forward; I dropped to one knee and covered her, watching her through my snap-up rifle scope. She ran under the ship, finally having to crouch and skitter sideways for the last couple score meters; this close to the ship, the underside looked like a building overhang where it rose away from the cup-shaped LZ. "Jesus," she muttered. "Sergeant Fly, get your butt up here and eyeball this thing." "What is it?" I asked, trotting toward her position at port-arms. "I'd rather you saw it for yourself without precon- ceptions." She sounded tense and excited, and I double-timed the pace. By the time I approached, I was panting. Jeez, what adding another stripe does to a Marine's physical fitness! Arlene didn't look tense; her RK-150 hung off her back totally casual. She was staring at something underneath the ship, where you'd have to crawl on your hands and knees to see it. She shone a pencil- light on the thing; it looked like a body of some sort, or was once . . . but definitely not a Fred. "Hold my rifle," I said, handing it to her. "I'm going under and take a look." She eyed the overhanging ship uneasily. "You sure this thing isn't going to roll over on you?" "If'n it do, li'l lady," I said, doing my Gunny Goforth imitation, "we-all gwan be inna heap'a trou- bles." The ship overhung us even where we stood, stretching a good fifty meters beyond us; if it chose to roll over, we'd be squashed like a bug on a bullet anyway, no matter where we stood. But I sure didn't like crawling under the thing; I could feel the mass of immensity over my back; I got about ten meters in when I experienced a rush of utter, total panic. I'd never felt claustrophobic before! Why then? The ship felt like an upside-down moun- tain balanced on its peak, ready to topple over and crush me. I froze, unable to move, while waves of panic battered me. The only thing that kept me from turning around and crab-crawling back out of there was the fact that Arlene was staring at me, and I would rather die than have her think a sergeant in the Marine Corps was a screaming coward. After a minute, the panic subsided into gripping anxiety; it was still horrible, but now bearable. "Are you all right?" Arlene called from behind me. "Y-yeah, just trying to f-figure out what the thing is. Gotta git a lit ... get a little closer." I forced myself to crawl until I was as close as I could get. I set up my Sure Fire flashlight-lantern to illuminate the body while I inched forward until my head was caught between the spongy material and the ship's hull. It was amazing, a scene straight out of The Wizard of Oz: when the Fred ship touched down, it landed right on top of a dead alien! It definitely wasn't a Fred; this creature looked more like an alien is supposed to look: white skin, long multiple articulated arms and legs, fingers like tendrils, not like the Freds' chopsticks or Sears and Roebuck's cilia. I swear to God, this thing actually had antennae, even. The eyes were huge, big as the cross-section on an F-99 Landing Flare, and Coca-Cola red; I couldn't quite see, but I think they continued around the back of the head. The face was turned toward me, and I got hot and cold chills running up and down my spine, like it was staring at me and demanding why? The mouth was a red slit, and there was no nose--dark lines on the sides of the face, where the cheeks would be on a human, might have been air filters. My heart started pounding again, another wave of panic; I was staring at my first Newbie--I just knew. After I calmed down a bit, I slithered sideways, through my light; it was a bad moment when I eclipsed the light, casting the Newbie into total shad- ow. God only knew what it was doing in the dark. I got far enough to the side to see the body and legs. "You know," I yelled back, my voice still shaky, "this thing doesn't look half bad. It's crushed a little, but I think it could be salvageable." Arlene yelled something back that I couldn't hear, then she got smart and spoke into her throat mike instead. "Can you drag it out if I throw you a rope?" "I bet I can," I responded. I was never a rodeo roper, but I'd been around a calf or two in my day. I grew up on a farm and worked the McDonald's Ranch when I was a kid. "Throw me the rope, A.S. I bet I can lasso that thing and drag it into the light of day. Kiddo, I think we may have gotten our first lucky break on this operation." 5 We carried our gruesome trophy back into the ship, plopping it down on the table right behind Sears and Roebuck. When they turned, they stared, eyes almost popping out of their skulls. "What that is?" "I was hoping you could tell us," I grumbled. I had gotten used to Sears and Roebuck's galaxy-weary, we've-seen-everything-twice pose; I was even more shocked than the Magillas themselves at their confu- sion. "Are you saying this is an entirely new race of beings you've never seen before?" "No," they said, "and whatever disgusting is it is. The color is all wrong and the eyes are something horrible. Where did you get it?" "Ship fell on it," explained Arlene. "Could this be a Newbie, the race Rumplestiltskin was on about, the guys that wiped out the Freds?" "Well something outwiped the Fred, that is sure," said Sears and Roebuck. "If there no other life forms of life here, then is logically that is the Newbie." "Great, fine, cool," I interrupted, "but can you revive the bloody thing?" I jabbed a meaty finger at them. "And don't hack off any arms or legs this time! You turned my stomach with what you did to Rum- plestiltskin." Sears and Roebuck didn't answer. Instead, they grabbed an ultrasound and an X-ray and began map- ping the gross anatomy of the Newbie. After half an hour of building up a reasonable 3-D model in the data stack, they dragged the heavy corpse into a ring that looked like it was made of bamboo--probably some sort of CAT scan or Kronke mapper that the Fred doctors used. Arlene and I kicked back and talked about old sci-fi movies we had watched. She thought the creature looked like the aliens in Communion, but I held out for a giant-size version of the things from E.T. Fi- nally, an hour and ten minutes into the examination, Sears and Roebuck suddenly answered, "Yes." It took me a moment to figure out they were answering my original question. "Say again? You're saying you can revive it?" "We can revive them if the other half you find." "Other half? S and R, this thing was alone under there . . . that's all there is; it's not a double-entity like you." They stared at me for a few moments, but I'm not sure they really got it. Sears and Roebuck were Klave, and the Klave were always paired . . . always paired. Normally, they couldn't even deal with individuals-- they literally couldn't see them! If you were alone, they would usually see a phantom second person; if you showed up as part of a triad--A, B, and C--the Klave would see three pairs: A and B, B and C, A and C . . . something we found out before Hidalgo bought it on the beam-in. But Sears and Roebuck was--were?--an ambassa- dor of sorts, and lately they'd gotten much practice coping with singles. Even so, sometimes they forgot. They looked offended and pained. They lugged the corpse to the operating table and began the process of first figuring out what had "killed" the Newbie, then fixing it; that was all it took to revive anything in the galaxy . . . except a human being. Sears and Roebuck spent a long time hunting for organic damage, finding nothing; at last, they an- nounced the mystery solved: the Newbie had died of malnutrition! Evidently, it had been left behind acci- dentally and eventually ran out of dietary supplement pills. As its last action, it went and lay down right on the LZ, hoping to be found and revived, and that was what nearly got the thing scrunched flatter than an armadillo on a tank tread. Another few meters to one side, and splat! Alas, that was a tough problem to cure. None of us had any idea how malnutrition affected Newbies. Sears and Roebuck did a biochemical analysis and thought they had isolated the essential nutrients. They compared them to what you could find on Fredworld, figuring out what was missing, then they had to guess what systems that would destroy. The upshot was that Arlene and I were ordered to take a hike for a day or two; we spent it exploring the ship, mapping all the "object-oriented" divisions of the ultraindividualist Freds. Strange, I never in my wildest nightmares thought I would be fighting along- side the ultimate collectivist Klave to defeat the ultraindividualist Freds! But a Marine is not there to make policy, just to enforce it. We checked back frequently. I wouldn't put it past Sears and Roebuck to revive the Newbie without bothering to wait for me and Arlene. But at last they said they were ready. They had been washing various organlike objects in a nutrient bath, running a low- level electrical current through them for two days. Now they jump-started the hearts with big jolts of electricity, and the damned thing moaned, flapped its arms, and sat up--alive again, oo-rah. The Newbie slowly stared at each of us, especially curious about Sears and Roebuck; it made no attempt to escape, attack, or even step off the operating table. I guess it figured we were unknown quantities--best not to rile us just yet. The thing started picking up our language from the moment we revived it. I asked Arlene whether she had me covered, and the Newbie had all the vocabulary I used (Arlene, name; you, me, pronouns; covered, guarded with a gun) and half our language structure (interrogative, expression) down cold in six seconds. I started asking it simple questions; after the second or third one, it was answering in good English, a lot better than Sears and Roebuck had ever managed to learn. An hour after reviving, we were having an animated conversation! "What is your name?" I asked. "Newbies." Thanks a lump. "Not you as a species, you as an individual. . . . What is your name?" "Newbies." I shook my head. There was some sort of confusion, but maybe it was just the language. "All right, Newbie, what did you do to the Freds, to the ones who were here before you?" "They were broken, but we couldn't fix them." "How were they broken?" The Newbie stared unanswering for a moment; I figured he was calculating the time factor. "Eleven decades elapsed between contacts by the Freds, and they had not grown to meet the circumstances. We expected to surrender and seek fixing, but they were broken and had to be fixed." "We found a Fred here who said you destroyed them, wiped them all off the face of the planet. Why did you kill him and his buddies?" "What is a Fred?" "A Fred! The Freds!" I waved my arms in exaspera- tion. "Why did you kill them?" "We are not familiar with a Fred. The Freds were broken; they did not grow to meet the circumstances. We attempted to fix them, but it was beyond our capabilities. We eliminated them from the mix while we studied the problem. The next time we encounter such a breakage, we shall have grown." The Newbie sat rigidly still on the operating table, arms hanging limply at its sides, almost as if they were barely usable. Probably the result of being dead and imperfectly revivified, I guessed. "Do you attempt to fix all races that don't, um, grow to meet the circum- stances?" "We have never encountered other races before. Until we grew, we did not realize we were a planet; we thought we were the world." "Why did the Newbies leave you behind?" "We are the Newbies. We don't understand the question. We require further growth or fixing." "Why are you, you personally, still here on Fred- world? Why aren't you with the Newbies?" "Your syntax is confusing us. We are here and we are there." Oh criminey! Another freaking hive culture. The Klave were bad enough, being able only to see pairs and powers of two (pairs of pairs of pairs)... now these Newbies didn't even understand the concept of an individual member of a species. "We must withdraw to consider your information," I said. "Newbies, please wait on this table and else- where." "Newbies will wait." The Newbie closed its eyes . . . and all life signs ceased! The machines giving their steady thuds with every beat of each heart (three--one in the groin area, one in the stomach, and a smaller one circulating blood through the head) fell silent, and a rasping buzz sounded as respiration and body temperature plunged. I stared. Had something inside the Newbie's stom- ach moved? I leaned close, staring, then I thought about that grotesque movie from the late 1900s and the thing popping out of the chest, so I stepped back warily. But something inside the Newbie was defi- nitely on the move; it rippled across the alien's belly from east to west, slithering around. "Sears and Roebuck," I called, "did you pick up any large parasites or symbiotes that might be using the Newbie as a host?" Sears and Roebuck looked at each other, hands on heads in agitation. "No," they said, "definitely noth- ing there was that produces such a motion could produce." "Jesus, Fly, what's happening to it? It looks like it's being eaten alive! Is it dying?" Arlene and I split, stepping to either side of the Newbie, weapons at the ready. The snake or worm or whatever it was pressed up against the Newbie's stomach, bulging out the flesh; Arlene and I backed up a step, thank God-- when the belly burst, blue-gray Newbie blood or fluid sprayed across the sickbay, splashing the wall and even spotting my uniform slightly. A gray serpent slithered through the opening . . . but the true horror was that the serpent had six heads! Then I blinked, and the scene abruptly changed: it wasn't a six-headed serpent; it was a tentacle with six prongs, or "fingers," at the end. It lashed about uncontrolled for a few minutes, falling limp at last. The Newbie opened his eyes. "Are you finished considering our information?" He seemed not at all perturbed by the new addition to his anatomy; in fact, he didn't even remark on it. I tried to think of a subtle way of asking what the hell was going on, but Arlene beat me to the line, demanding, "How the hell did you grow a tentacle out of your gut?" The Newbie looked down in obvious surprise. "We aren't sure what event has stimulated this growth." "It'll come to you, I'm sure," I muttered, "but we're not quite finished considering your information. Please excuse us." The Newbie became rigid again, and its vital signs dropped away to zero. I stepped back and spoke for Arlene's ears only--presuming that the Newbie hadn't evolved super-sensitive hearing in the last five minutes. "We are in deep, deep kimchee, kiddo." She looked up and down. "Oh, come on; we can still take it." Her red brows furrowed, then raised. "Oh! You mean we Earthlings? Yeep, I hadn't even thought of that. Damn." Newbies, hundreds of millions of Newbies, scour- ing the galaxy looking for races to "fix," evolving so rapidly that they were a whole different species from one battle to the next. Newbies with a violent streak sufficient to wipe the Freds from the face of their home planet. Newbies discovering the embryonic human race, just beginning to poke our noses into the interga- lactic fray--these were frightening thoughts. Arlene grimaced and absently tugged at her ear, following her own agitated turn of thought. "Fly, we have to find them. We have to find out which way they're headed and warn Earth." "What is Earth by now? Maybe we deserve wiping out . . . who knows?" Now she turned the brunt of her blue-eyed, icy anger on me. "I don't think I follow you--Sergeant." "Just thinking out loud; don't pay any attention. Course we're going to warn the country, or what's left of it, whoever's in charge. I just wonder; it's been two hundred odd years back home; it'll have been another two centuries before we can get back, maybe longer, depending on where the Newbies lead us. I just wonder whether there's still anything left worth warning." I didn't know how much of the conversation Sears and Roebuck had heard--little, I hoped. I stepped forward and spoke aloud, rousing the Newbie. "New- bies, attention please. Take us to your--to the rest of you, please. Can you do that?" It opened its eyes and spoke but did not otherwise move. "We can take you to us if we have not changed our plan for exploration. We are going to [unintelligi- ble], but we do not know where we will go from there." "If we leave now," Arlene whispered in my ear, "we'll still arrive about forty years after the Newbies arrived, no matter where it is." "Can you give--ah, the Klave bearing and distance to your location?" The Newbie turned to Sears and Roebuck and spoke in a different language. And the latter re- sponded in the same tongue! Arlene and I stared at each other; when had the Newbie learned to speak Klavish? Then she rolled her eyes and solved the mystery: "Learned it from the Freds, of course." It probably wasn't Klavish, actually, just some common language the two sides, the Hyperrealists and the Deconstructionists, used for interparty negotiation. Sears and Roebuck turned back to the local naviga- tional system. Evidently, in the absence of conflicting orders from any other section of the ship, any one station was sufficient to pilot the entire vessel. "Voy- age taking us another eight of weeks, it will," an- nounced the pair of Klave. "External times in the hundred and twenty of years." Eight more long weeks . . . God, just what I wanted. I took a deep breath. "Push the button, Max," I said. Arlene gave me a swift kick in the ankle. The lift sequence was bizarre. It took a full day, much of which was a carefully calculated refueling that the ship carried out automatically after Sears and Roebuck programmed the course. Arlene interrogated the Klave extensively on just how the launch itself worked, then briefed me, like a good junior NCO. On their homeworld, the Freds used something Arlene called a "pinwheel launcher," which she de- scribed as a huge asterisk in orbit around the planet. Each limb of the asterisk was a boom with a hook attached; the diameter of the asterisk, counting the booms, was something on the order of seven thousand kilometers! The whole pinwheel affair rotated directly opposite the day-night rotation of the planet. The spokes of the pinwheel descended from the sky and just kissed the ground; at that precise point, ground and boom were moving exactly the same speed and direction ... so from the viewpoint of a ship on the runway--our ship--the boom appeared to hesitate motionless for a moment. That was the moment that our ship attached itself to the boom; in that fraction of a second, the Fred ship transformed itself from being a member of the Fredworld system to a member of the pinwheel sys- tem. Then, as the pinwheel continued to rotate, it pulled our ship up with it ... gently at first; it felt like zero-g for a few minutes. Then we felt the centrifugal tug as we were yanked in a different direction than the planetary rotation. The g force increased rapidly, then just as suddenly, it decreased as the inertial dampers kicked online. Still, my stomach flew south while the rest of me went north, and I longed for the comfortable, familiar disorientation of mere zero-g! That was a first, I was absolutely convinced--Fly Taggart longing for free- fall! The pinwheel carried us up and around, then at perigee, the highest point of our little mini-orbit around the center of mass of the rotating asterisk, the ship decoupled, launching us into space. We were once again at freefall, and I regretted my earlier wish for it. But the ship immediately started spinning up, eventually hitting 0.8 g again. Meanwhile, the engines began to whine and moan and loudly groan, and we felt the hard backward push that indicated we had started our long acceleration, prior to the seven-week drift, culminating with the hard deceleration at the other end, dropping us into . .. into what? It was a frightening thought. And we would have fifty-eight creeping days to think about it. We fell into a standardized shipboard routine: training, mess, watchstanding, strategic mental im- provement (we played chess and Go), and endless worrying, discussing, theorizing, emotional reminis- cence of all that was best on Earth before this whole, horrible nightmare started. Once again, I took to walking the long, wet, slimy, hot corridors ... but this time with Arlene at my side. Everything we saw reminded us of the monsters the Freds created for us; they drew heavily from their own world. They loved dark alcoves, doors that opened suddenly with only a hiss for a warning; I couldn't count how many times I whirled around, drawing down on a frigging door! Horrible bas-relief faces adorned every flat surface. Then, right in the middle of a passageway on a space ship, for Pete's sake, we'd run into a fountain of some dark red fluid that sure as hell looked like blood. The walls never seemed quite straight. Maybe straight lines and right-angle turns bothered the Freds as much as the crazy geometry set my neck hairs upright. "Take a look," Arlene said, pointing at a door through which we had to pass. I sucked in a breath. "The mouth of Moloch? Jesus, Albert should be here." I looked sharply over at her, but she wasn't torqued by the reference to her once and only. She nodded slowly. "Albert would have loved this spread." That was Arlene Sanders: her response to grief and fear was literary irony. A perfect Marine. Jesus, I felt homesick. Just a few months ago--my time--I was wasting my life at Camp Pendleton, loafing and pulling the occasional watch, thinking of not reupping and dropping back into the world in- stead. I had a fiancée, now deceased; I had parents and high-school friends; I had the expectation that the world would look pretty much the same twenty years later. Then we got sent to Kefiristan, but even that was all right; it was crap, but it was the crap I'd always known was possible in my chosen profession. But when they yanked us out of the Pearl Triangle and boosted Fox Company up to Phobos . . . well, they yanked me out of my comfortable reality and threw me into primordial chaos. So now I was jogging the length and circumference of an alien spaceship, hurling toward an unknown star at nearly lightspeed, with a plural alien as ally and a mutable thing for a guide; the only constancy was Arlene Sanders, now my last and only friend. It's not just a job, man, it's an adventure. The weeks crawled past like worms on a wet side- walk. Every few days, the Newbie mutated, evolved, whatever you call it, slowly transforming from the roughly humanoid shape we first found into a truly alien form with a distended stomach, a pushed-in jaw, and longer arms. I found the change fascinating and a little scary; who was to say it wouldn't evolve into something we couldn't handle? But a queer thing happened: the closer we got to the planetary system, which we nicknamed Skinwalker because it was where we would find the shape-shifters, the more frightened the Newbie became. He was scared, terrified! I asked what he was so frightened of, and he answered, "We are subject to different stimulae; we are frightened of how we have grown to adapt to the native circumstances." "You're scared you're no longer the same species!" I accused. The Newbie said nothing, going limp again--its usual response to information it could not handle. Of course it couldn't. ... I had just suggested that unity was bifurcated, that what had been one was now two! The Newbie had no words inside its head to explain that concept: it conceived of itself as every- thing and nothing ... all of the Newbie species at once and nothing of itself. How can you divide "everything" into two piles, one of which is still labeled "everything"? The Newbie was starting to realize that whatever was waiting for us on Skinwalker was not the Newbie race--not anymore. It was terrified of what its own people had become, just as Arlene and I were terrified of what Earth would look like when we finally re- turned. We hawk-watched the Newbie for the first couple of weeks, but it never did anything but sit on the table, unmoving, and answer questions we asked it. It never initiated conversations or tried to move. We sur- veilled it, watching through an air-circulation grate to see what it did when it thought no one was around; either it didn't do anything or else it knew somehow that we were there. Sears and Roebuck told me that there was a hidden video system aboard the ship, used by the captain to spy on the rest of his crew, but we couldn't find it, and we had thrown most of the Freds overboard on Fredworld, so we couldn't revive the captain to tell us himself . . . even if that idea weren't so utterly stupid that I wouldn't even mention it to my lance. Gradually, we came to accept the immobile, silent alien in the sickbay, then we started even to forget he was there at all. I found myself and Arlene casually talking in front of him about stuff he really wasn't cleared to hear. After all, he was still the representa- tive of the enemy, even if he and they had evolved in separate directions for forty years, which was the equivalent of possibly forty million dog years. Five weeks into the eight-week voyage, Arlene ex- perienced every Marine's worst nightmare: something terrible happened on her watch. The first I knew about it was three hours later, when she shook me awake out of a fitful sleep, where I dreamed we land- ed in a sea that turned out to be one, humongous Newbie circling the planet, waiting to fold us gently in arms like mountains and drag us to a watery grave fifty fathoms down. "Get up, get up, Fly," she said urgently. "Battle stations!" In an eyeblink, I was out of bed, stark naked, with a .40-cal pistol in my hands. "What? Where?" I demanded, looking for the ene- my. We were alone in the room we called the barracks; even Sears and Roebuck were missing, though they'd been there when I went to sleep. "Fly, I screwed the pooch. Real bad." She looked so pale and stricken that I almost reached out to hug her. It wouldn't have been appreciated; there were times she was a friend and times she was a Marine Corps Lance Corporal. "What did you do, Lance?" Her face took on the mask, what we wear when we have to go report a dereliction of duty (our own) to the XO: stone cold and icy white, lips as taut as strings stretched to their breaking point. "Sergeant, I was on watch at 0322; I went to check on the prisoner in sickbay, but he was gone." It took a moment for the intel to sink in. "Gone? What the hell do you mean? Where did he go?" I glanced at my watch, the only thing I wore: 0745. The Newbie had been missing for at least four hours and twenty minutes. "I can't find him, Sarge. I've looked . . . Sears and Roebuck and I have crawled this entire freaking ship up one side and down the other, and we can't find a shred of evidence that he was ever here!" "Where are the Klave?" "They're still looking, but I think if we were going to find the Newbie, we'd have found traces at least by now." She lowered her voice and looked truly ashamed; it was the first time I had ever seen her like that, and I didn't like it. "I think he's, ah, been planning this break for a long, long time--weeks, probably." I pulled on my cammies, T-shirt, and jacket while she talked. "God, Arlene, you're asking me to believe that the Newbie sat utterly still without moving for five weeks, just to lull us into a false sense of security! Christ, do you realize how ridiculous that sounds?" "It's what he did, Fly. I just know it." We conducted a rigorous search, but, of course, if the person being sought doesn't want to be found, it's not difficult to avoid four people--well, three actu- ally, since Sears and Roebuck are inseparable by nature--on a ship with fifty square kilometers of deckspace. We finally gave in to exhaustion at 1310 after more than five hours of continuous searching. The son of a bitch didn't want to be found, and by God we weren't going to find him. If he was even still a him, or a Newbie, for that matter, what weird mutation had he undergone this time? I shuddered at the horrific, Hieronymus Bosch images conjured up by my mind. Then abruptly the ship's "gravity," the acceleration toward the outside hull, shifted radically. Suddenly, down was not just out but forward as well. Only one event could have caused that effect . . . and it meant we had found our elusive gremlin, sort of: "Criminen- talies, he's made his way to another set of nav controls!" I shouted in Arlene's ear; he was slowing us down or turning us, driving us away from Skinwalker and sabotaging the mission! This Newbie had evolved an independent personality . . . and he was determined not to risk contact with the tribe, no matter what the cost to the rest of the galaxy. 6 "Christ, S and R--do something!" Having issued my first military command in a week, I did what any good military man does when confronted with an invisible enemy: I ran in circles, screaming and shouting. Sears and Roebuck looked frustrated, being constitutionally unable to follow the order "do something." Then Arlene, whirling rapidly in every direction with her magazine-fed shotgun, thought of the obvi- ous: "Fly! Isn't this stupid Fred ship steered by consensus?" "Yes! I don't know what that means!" "Maybe S and R should hump over to another nav center and issue another vote for our course!" Sears and Roebuck started to run, but I grabbed one of their arms. "Wait--before you go, set up a computer loop that continually issues the command to get us back on course . . . run from nav to nav, setting up the same order wherever you can. Go!" I gestured Arlene to me. "Okay, Lance, you and I are going hunting." She licked her lips; sometimes that girl is just a little too Marine. The gravity stopped, then reversed; we had out- voted the Newbie. But while we broke out into one of the outer corridors and ran the length of the ship, the situation reversed, and again we started slowing. The damned Newbie was doing the same thing we were! "Arlene--how many navigational centers?" "Um . . . forty-one that I counted." "Corporal, that thing has evolved intelligence be- yond ours. We can't outthink him, so there's only one thing to do: we have to drag him down to our level by attacking without thought or planning, purely chance encounters and brute force." We bolted through corridors lit only by our own flashes, dashing from nav to nav at random--random as a human brain can do--desperately hoping to catch the Newbie as he visited nav after nav. We ran into Sears and Roebuck--twice! But the Newbie remained as elusive as ever. The third time we bumped into the Klave and nearly blew them away, I had had enough. "Screw it, A.S.--just start pounding a shell into each nav center as we find it." It was time to reduce the choices. We went method- ically from center to center, and in every room, Arlene raised her semi-auto shotgun and pumped three or four shells into the delicate programming equipment. Everywhere we went, we tripped over dead Freds that we didn't even remember killing (and hadn't got around to dumping), so intense had been that firefight when we took over the ship. We had destroyed more than half the navs and had been hurled to the ground a dozen times by radical acceleration changes when we finally kicked a door and saw our enemy. The Newbie had his head buried in the guts of one of the destroyed navs, trying to repair it enough to cast another vote for slow-down. He jerked his new triple-heads up as we entered; his tentacle-arm snaked down the circuitry, bypassing the damage. "There is no need for violence," one of the heads said, speaking in calm, measured tones. "We must join forces against the Freds. The Newbies have decided they cannot coexist with the Deconstruction- ists. If you continue on the present course, we will be wiped out by the Newbies, who have their own agenda. Please, just listen to us!" He started to make a whole lot of sense. Arlene lowered her shotgun hesitantly, waiting to hear him out. So I shot the frigging bastard before he could utter another syllable. I raised my M-14 and squeezed off a burst of four, the big rifle kicking against my shoulder like a Missouri mule, disemboweling the Newbie where he stood. Arlene stared. "Jesus, Fly" was all she said, her voice tentative and questioning. The Newbie staggered back against a hydraulic pump--God only knows what use the Freds had for hydraulics in a spaceship--but it didn't clutch its belly or moan or gasp "ya got me!" or anything. It bled, the blood being pinkish white, like pale Pepto- Bismol. A bulge started in his side. I understood immediately--it was evolving more organs to relink around the damage! I blasted them, too, and at last the damned thing truly died ... as nearly dead as the living dead ever could be. It bubbled softly, leaning back against a bulkhead, then nothing. Yeah, but I'd seen that act before. I unloaded the rest of the magazine into him, hitting every major biological system I could imagine. I guess maybe I went a little overkill; but, criminey, what else could I do? "A.S.," I explained guiltily, "he was getting under our skin. I had to do it! If I'd have let him speak, Lance, he would have had us eating his solid waste in five minutes flat." "I ... understand, but--Jesus, Fly!" The Newbie slid slowly to the ground, staring at me with such intensity I almost reloaded and shot anoth- er burst into its face, just to shut those eyes! I didn't. But for the first time, I really understood the protago- nist of Poe's "The Telltale Heart." He turned his head to the side, staring down at the deck. I think he was already "dead," unable to control his neck and eye muscles, but I still know he saw what he saw. They all did. "Jesus was a man of action, Corporal." I was getting a bit offended at her taking of the Lord's name in vain. Maybe I was just a bit worried that Jesus might not have liked what I had just done. "I had no choice ... his tongue was silver!" She just stared, shaking her head. The ship contin- ued to accelerate back to cruising speed, giving us two "down" directions: outboard and aft. I felt sick, but I didn't know whether it was from the weird "gravity" or being sick at heart about what I had just done-- blown away the only representative we had met from an entirely new alien species. We found Sears and Roebuck and told them they could stop programming navigational centers. We were alone. The Newbie's ghost could join that of Rumplestiltskin and every other dead Fred on board. We picked up the creature's body, bearing him aft to the "bridge," just about midway along the ship's body; actually, this bridge was just one among many. We set him up in the co-pilot's chair, where the Fred captain had been slain. Enemies in battle, they could become fast allies guiding the ship of death with spectral hands. The Newbie weighed more than I would have expected, about twice what Arlene weighed. I wished the nav cabins were closer to the central core of the ship, so we wouldn't have to lug the dead thing through nearly a full g of acceleration. This marked the second time in living memory when Fly Taggart ever wished for zero-g! We ramped up to speed again, but the monkeying around had cost us ten days of travel and a dreadful amount of fuel. I didn't understand how two hours of space-jockeying could cost us ten days until Arlene explained the fuel problem. The fuel was calculated on two assisted accelerations: ramping up at the beginning of the journey, after being launched by the pinwheel launcher from Fredworld, and slowing down at the end all by our lonesome. I mostly nodded and said "uh-huh" whenever she paused to wait for my response. I was really only interested in one aspect, which she finally disgorged. The ramscoop only worked at a certain speed, and you had to accelerate to that speed by other means . . . hence, the hydrogen and liquid oxygen fuel we carried. The hydrogen was no problem; the ship replenished the store as a byproduct of fusion--I guess not all the hydrogen fused, or something. But the LOX, as Arlene called it, was irreplaceable--once it was gone, it was gone. The bastard Newbie had used a lot of it trying to slow us down. We didn't have enough left to do a hundred-g burn for three days and match orbits with Skinwalker. We would have to start slowing a subjec- tive week earlier by shutting down the ramjet fusion entirely and just letting the friction of interstellar hydrogen against the ramscoop slow us some. Then we would manually burn at lower thrust, conserving our fuel and hopefully matching velocities.... If not, we either would stop short, dead in space, drifting at whatever velocity relative to the planet we finally ran out of fuel, sailing on past the planet and waving bye- bye in the rear windshield--or else we might plow into the hunk of rock at a couple of hundred kilome- ters per second, punching out a crater the size of the Gulf of Mexico and, incidentally, atomizing us and the ship. It all depended on Sears and Roebuck. Arlene and I offered to help--we told them about our brilliant piloting of the makeshift mail-rocket coming down from the relocated Deimos moon to Earth's surface-- but the Klave just looked at each other, each putting his gorilla-size hand on the other's head, and pumped their crania up and down. We took it to be laughter that time--derisive laughter. I had no idea how good a pilot Sears and Roebuck were, but I had a bad feeling it was like the President taking the stick of Air Force One when the pilot has a heart attack. Better than giving it to the presidential janitor, though, which was basically where Arlene and I stood in the pecking order. God, how I wished we hadn't left Commander Taylor back at the Hyperreal- ist military base! That babe could fly anything. The other big problem was that unlike back at Fredworld, we had no friendly pinwheel launcher to catch us here and lower us more or less gently to the surface. We were entirely on our own. The rest of the journey was uneventful, including the extra ten days of grace. We trained and practiced various emergency drills, just for something to do: one of the biggest problems with spaceflight is the incredible, relentless boredom, but if there's one thing the Marine Corps teaches you to handle, it's ennui. We were always sitting on our hands, waiting for somebody further up the food chain to finish a mysterious errand, while the rest of us jarheads, men with stripes on our sleeves, waited for The Word. It wasn't like they let any grass grow under our feet. There's always something to do around a military base, even if it's just putting a nice polish on the brass cannon on the stone steps at Pensacola (or scrubbing the base CO's hardwood office floor with tooth- brushes). If you manage to "miss" your gunny or your top, you might find yourself with a whole afternoon free, but there was always the NCO club to soak up any extra dollars. On the Fred ship, it was both more and less difficult to find something to do for weeks and weeks--harder because there weren't any butterbars, silverbells, or railroad tracks to tell us what to do, but easier because we were on an alien space ship full of strange and wonderful things to poke and monkey with, three main corridors of 3.7 kilometers each at 0.8 g and one at zero-g. I actually learned to tolerate zero-g for several hours at a time with only a slight floaty feeling in my stomach. Arlene loved it, naturally. The central shaft that I called the zero-g corridor was dodecahedral, according to A.S.--it had twelve sides. But the cor- ners weren't sharp, they were rounded off, and the sides were not very symmetrical in any case. Like everything else in Fredland, the entire corridor disori- ented me, like looking at one of those paintings by Picasso where the eyes are head-on, but the nose is in profile. There was a totally cool red pulse that traveled the length of the shaft--from back to front, oddly enough--that reminded me so much of an old sci-fi flick that we dubbed it the Warp Coil Pulse. The walls mu