I glanced at my helmet display. Distributing a cluster bomb across an entire planet took time. Detonation of the bomblets was hours away.
To my front, a dozen Slugs inched forward. If they came too close, the Cavorite in the impeller would kill them, but Slug Warriors didn’t care. I raised Ord’s pistol, fired, and dropped the lead Slug like a punctured water balloon.
I fingered the two clips in the ammunition pouch on Ord’s holster as the Slugs drew closer. Give or take, at one round per Slug, I was short a minimum of fifty thousand rounds.
Twenty minutes later, kamikaze maggots swarmed the Scorpion, Jeeb, and me three deep while I pounded on them with Ord’s empty pistol.
Nobody really knew what happened to GIs who had been overrun by Slugs over the course of the war. But these didn’t shoot me with their mag rifles, nor stab me with the blades on their rifles’ edges, though they could have.
When poisoned Warriors fell away, others replaced them, until they had dragged me, with Jeeb on my shoulder, squealing and flailing his locomotors at them, out onto their big daddy’s skin. When they were far enough away from the Scorpion that the new Warrior crop could surround me without poisoning themselves, they drew back fifty yards, then just sat there.
Jeeb sat alongside me. My helmet timer ticked down, too slowly. Eleven hours before the bomblets went off. I smiled a little. The bomblets strewn across this planet would kill the Pseudocephalopod. The Slugs couldn’t stop that onrushing train, even if they knew they were stuck on the tracks.
My smile faded. With my ship wrecked, and on the wrong side of a black hole anyway, I would be marooned here on my enemy’s corpse, with Jeeb, my ’Bot Friday, until I starved. But I still wanted to be the last species standing.
“
“
I stared down alongside me. The vibration was real enough. But the noise was coming from Jeeb’s audio output. A TOT, a Tactical Observation Transport, was designed as a battlefield snoop. In one turkey-sized package, it incorporated sensors not just to see the enemy from above or from ground level, but to hear the enemy. It eavesdropped on communications, decrypted ciphers, translated foreign languages, even ones it didn’t know, then spat out what it processed, like a spaniel retrieving an old print newspaper for its master.
In forty years, no TOT had ever intercepted Slug-to-Slug communication, though Howard’s Spooks had tried.
So the Pseudocephalopod wasn’t talking to its minions that held us at mag-rifle point. It wasn’t talking to itself.
It was talking to me.
SEVENTY-SIX
AS HISTORIC STANDOFFS GO, this didn’t look like much. For the next ten hours I sat, pistol holstered, arms clasped around my armored knees, in the center of a mass of motionless Slug Warriors, which were no more separate from the organism I sat on than white corpuscles.
Meantime, as the timer counted down toward Slug Armageddon, Jeeb’s circuits chittered back and forth with the Pseudocephalopod as Jeeb deciphered the communication he monitored.
Above, the captive Red Moon orbited around the planet’s equator, south of us. The Red Moon had set when syllables began to trickle from Jeeb’s audio, then words. Finally, I heard the Pseudocephalopod, its voice a flat, mechanical simulation.
“Man. You have come to harm me.”
A Slug of few words. After another few hundred thousand exchanges, the translation would be smooth and idiomatic. For the moment, the meaning was plain enough. The Big Slug was on to us, more or less.
“You already harmed us. Many of us.”
“I have not harmed man.”
“There is more than one man. You have not harmed all of man. But you have harmed man.” By the millions. Without remorse.
“I have learned this. Man has many…” Jeeb’s translator stumbled. “Identities.”
The Spooks had always thought that this unitary intelligence couldn’t understand the concept of mankind, or any other kind, as multiple individuals.
The adrenaline of rage surged through me. “My mother. My lover. My friends. Infants. Old people. You harmed them all.” I kicked the vast skin beneath my feet as though the thing could feel it. “Have you learned that I-this identity of man-can kill you now? I’m bringing the rain on you.” The green numbers of my helmet display timer winked down to nine minutes. “And you can’t stop me. Then I’ll beat feet out of here.” The last was bravado. This was a one-way journey for me. But at least it was ending at a worthwhile destination.
“I have learned this. But I have the…” Jeeb’s translator stumbled. “Cavorite.”
I frowned and glanced again at the timer as it spun down. “You’ve had Cavorite for a long time before this. What’s changed?”
“As I am immersed deeper in this universe I suddenly understand more.”
I snorted. “You and Archimedes.”
“What is Archimedes, man?”
“Not what, who. Archimedes was the name of a separate identity of man. He immersed himself in a water tub and then suddenly understood a great truth about the universe. Each separate identity of man has a name, so we can communicate.”
Pause.
“I wish to communicate, man. Say your name.”
“Lieutenant General Jason Wander, retired” would require explanation of socioeconomic designators, surnames, and given names, which was pushing the envelope with a hermit. “Jason.”
“Jason, you will call me Archimedes.”
“I’ll call you whatever I want to. Murderer. Dead Slug walking. Archimedes already took that name.”
“Then bring Archimedes.”
“I can’t. He’s dead.”
“What is dead?”
I snorted again. “Harmed. No longer able to immerse. Returned to dust. Like what you did to sixty million of man’s identities. And now like you, Archie.”
“Man can still immerse. Therefore Man is not dead. Archie can still immerse. Therefore Archie is not dead.”
My jaw dropped so far that I blipped my helmet’s chin control. This thing really didn’t get it. One day a half- million years ago, Archie had realized that he existed. Over the half-million years since that day, he had never seen any other of his kind die, because there were no others of his kind. So he couldn’t understand the difference between dead and alive. As far as he was concerned, he had done no more than trim mankind’s fingernails.
What if he wasn’t going to use the Red Moon to exterminate mankind?
“Archie, why did you take the Red Moon?”
“Archie is fully immersed in this universe. Archie wishes to immerse in another universe. Only the Red Moon will allow Archie to beat feet.”
I nodded to myself. After a half-million years alone, in one place, even a big, interesting place, I might yearn for new challenges. In fact, I did, in a lot shorter time.
Archie wanted a change of scene. But Archie had no feet, no wheels, no cruise liner. He was like a curious infant who had grown up on a desert island. The only life raft he possessed was what he had stumbled onto in his youth, Cavorite. And because Archie had developed a serious weight problem in middle age, he needed lots of it in order to travel.
