Endgame by Dafydd Ab Hugh

if we stumble onto a whole nest of them.”
    Sears and Roebuck looked at each other, Alley Oop and his mirror image; they seemed perfectly content staying aboard the ship and letting the Marines do the dirty work. I sealed up the helmet and pressed the other armor seals tight; it wasn’t a pressure suit, but in a pinch, we could survive a few minutes in hard vacuum. I noticed Arlene’s face was whiter than its usual English pale; she must have figured the odds the same as I.
    My breath sounded loud in my ears as we edged down the gangway onto the surface of Fredworld again. The landscape looked eerily alive through the night-vis flipdowns, tinted green but combining infrared, radio emission, and visible light enhancement. I turned slowly with a microwave motion detector; nothing moved around us, unless it was over the jagged mountains on the horizon.
    â€œThis isn’t good,” I said over a shielded, encrypted channel to Arlene. “Shouldn’t there be some life, even if the Newbies killed all the Freds?”
    â€œMaybe they couldn’t tell which were Freds and which were animals, so they fragged everything. Maybe they used a nuclear bomb, or some kind of poison or a biovector.”
    I grunted. “Doesn’t seem likely that they’d manage to get absolutely every living thing, does it?”
    â€œThere’s another possibility, Fly: maybe there are living animals, but they’re just not moving.”
    â€œAnimal means moving, Arlene, like animated.” She didn’t answer, so I started a spiral sweep, mainly watching the outer perimeter. After three hours of recon, I was starting to regret being so nice and burning Rumplestiltskin’s mortal coil, setting free his soul. “If that bastard lied to me—”
    â€œYou’ll what?” came Arlene’s radio voice in my ear. “Resurrect him and kill him again?”
    â€œMaybe we should resurrect the Freds on the ship. Whoops, don’t correct me; I just figured out how stupid that suggestion was.” I managed to catch her while she was inhaling, or else she would have quickly snorted that the Freds on the ship knew even less about the Newbies than we—we had already killed them before we left for Fredworld, a hundred and sixty years before the Newbies landed!
    The weirdness of the place was starting to get to me. I kept seeing ghosts in my peripheral vision, but there was nothing when I whipped around with the motion detector. “Damn that Rumplestiltskin! He swore they were still here!”
    â€œMaybe he just meant they were here when he died?”
    I paused a long time. “Arlene, if that’s all he meant, then we’re in deep, deep trouble. I don’t think you realize how deep.”
    â€œI don’t get you. If we can’t find them, we jump back in the ship and return to—to Earth.” She didn’t say it, but I knew she was thinking to a dead, loveless Earth with no Albert Gallatin.
    â€œA.S., if we don’t find the Newbies, I can almost guarantee they’re going to find us. They’ll find Earth. We were almost wiped out by the Freds. We barely hung on, and only because we evolved so much faster than they, we were so much more flexible—because they underestimated us! What the hell do you thinkwould happen to humanity if the Newbies found us next?”
    â€œJesus. I didn’t think—”
    â€œAnd if they can go from stone plows and oxen to—to this in just two hundred years, where are they going to be just ten years from now? What if they don’t find us for fifty years, or a hundred years? Jesus and Mary, Arlene; they would be gods.”
    She was silent; I heard only my own breath. I almost considered asking her to switch to hot-mike, so I could hear her breathing as well, but I couldn’t afford to lose control now, not when I had troops depending on me. Above all else, I had to demonstrate competence and