Endgame by Dafydd Ab Hugh Page 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. Wesuffered 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 something. 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 lastmoment, 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 Buchanan 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 procedures 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