Free Endgame by Dafydd Ab Hugh Page B

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 instead. 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 sidewalk. Every few days, the Newbie mutated, evolved, whatever you call it, slowly transforming from theroughly 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.”
    â€œYou’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 everything 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 returned.
    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 surveilled 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 thatthere was a hidden video system