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and fresh at the other end.
All good things come to an end.
All bad things come to an end.
"A teleporter ought to be nothing for you after your
Gate problem," Arlene said, trying to cheer me up.
The damage to S&R's ship provided an unexpected
tactical advantage. We might never return to the
message alien base, but now we had a nice decoy to
distract the Freds while we used the teleporter. S&R
sent the remains of their ship straight at a Fred
defense satellite. We hated to see it go. It was a good
ship.
Disembarking from a ship had never been easier.
There was no damage to the airlocks. We were already
suited up and ready to go teleport-hunting. All in a
day's work.
I would have said that if you've seen one transmat-
ter device, you've seen them all, but that wasn't true.
This one didn't have a stone arch built over it with
lots of weird crap carved into it, though.
I might have used my experience with the Gate on
Phobos as an excuse for being superstitious, but there
was no point. Much of what we'd seen since leaving
our solar system made no sense according to our
physics. So there was nothing for us to do but have
faith in the engineering that worked. None of the
amazing alien technology had let me down yet, except
for one small Gate glitch.
I waited my turn and took a deep breath. Then I
stepped forward to meet my destiny.
31
I'd never heard a hairy bag of protoplasm call
out my name before: "Fly!"
Looking down, I noticed something glistening on
the floor near my boot. I was slow on the pickup
because I had my priorities. First, the boot. That
meant we still had our clothes and weapons. Second,
we were back in gravity. So what if my back hurt and
my arches complained? Gravity, sweet gravity. Third
. . . third, there was some kind of problem.
Liquid was leaking from the flesh bag. It was sort of
a faded pink I'd never associated with blood. I took a
closer look at the bag and recognized a human mouth.
I'd never seen a mouth all alone before, surrounded
by a wrinkled mass of skin sweating pink stuff.
The little voice in the back of my head was about to
give me hell for not being more observant, and for not
thinking at all. Arlene saved it the trouble with a
scream. I didn't blame her for screaming. I screamed
too, the moment my brain started firing on all cylin-
ders. The nitwit who came up with the idea that a
strong woman should never scream had his head so
far up his ass that daylight was a myth to him.
S&R didn't understand what had happened. They
asked what had happened to the other units. They
meant Hidalgo-Fly, and Hidalgo-Arlene. We tried to
explain that the dying thing on the floor was Hidalgo.
S&R would always have problems with the idea of
death.
Arlene and I were more acquainted with that idea.
Even as the blob of protoplasm begged for us to
"finish" it, we were simultaneously firing our zap
guns. The two beams of heat crossed each other,
carving the blob into smaller pieces that didn't talk.
We kept at it past the point of necessity.
"Why did you send new unit away?" asked S&R.
The Klave mind found what had happened intriguing.
They may have thought Hidalgo had been trans-
formed into something closer to them, a duality of
some kind. I didn't know. I didn't care.
The officer, the man Arlene had once considered
spacing out an airlock, had proved himself one of
Earth's best. He'd been the leader of our fire team. We
owed him what we had just done for him.
Funny thing. He'd fought his quota of monsters. A
steam demon had taken his wife. He'd kicked butt
with hell-princes and spiders. On Phobos he was a
bud, helping take down the imps and the flying skulls
and the superpumpkin. He was a veteran of the Doom
War.
And a freakin' teleporter nails him. Shit. A bleeding
technological foul-up. It made me so mad I saw Mars-
red. We owed him more than putting him out of his
misery. We owed him words, a proper farewell due an
honorable man.
We gave him a different kind of farewell, worthy of
a good marine. Our first Freds made the bad mistake
of showing up just then. I didn't leave any for Arlene
or S&R. The ray guns made my job too easy.
Yeah, right. Isn't technology grand? It fries Hidalgo
and then gives me a push-button method of avenging
him. We kicked ass. Nothing made me feel better. The
guns were light, and they didn't need reloading. S&R
mentioned they'd need recharging eventually, but
they were good for a thousand kills per charge. I tried
my best to use it up.
A few Freds fired off a few saucers. Their aim was
not up to Marine Corps standards.
S&R aimed at the Freds' chests to get the brain
right away. When I realized the aliens could feel pain I
started aiming for the artichoke heads and the arms [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]