Endgame Read Free

like I did, and she started making snippy comments.
    I knew I’d won when she sat down four days after the shooting incident and demanded, “All right, Sergeant, now tell me again why you had to do something so bone-sick stupid as to step in front of a live rifle.”
    â€œTo piss you off,” I answered, truthfully.
    Arlene stared, her mouth hanging open. She had shaved her hair into a high-and-tight again, and it was so short on top, it was almost iridescent orange. Her uniform was freshly laundered—Sears and Roebuck had showed us how to use the Fred washing machines when we first took over the ship, two weeks earlier—and I swear to God she had ironed everything. She had been working out, too; she looked harder, tighter than she had just a few days earlier, and it wasn’t just her haircut. Now I was the only one getting soft and flabby.
    â€œTo piss me off? For God’s sake, why?”
    â€œA.S.,” I said, leaning so close we were breathing each other’s O 2 , “I don’t think you realize how close I came to losing you. Despair is a terrible, terrible mental illness; apathy is a freaking disease. I had to do something so shocking, something to give you such a burst of adrenaline, that it would jerk you out of your feedback loop and drag you, kicking and screaming, back to the here and now.”
    I scratched my stubbly chin, feeling myself flush. “All right, maybe it was pretty bone-sick stupid. But I was desperate! What should I have done? I don’t think you know just what you mean to me, old girl.”
    She slid up to sit cross-legged on the table, staring around the huge empty mess hall. No officers around, and no non-coms but me. Why not? “Fly,” she said, “I don’t think you know just what Albert meant to me. Means—meant—is he dead or alive now?”
    â€œProbably still alive. It’s only been about twenty years or so on Earth . . . or will have only been by this point, when we get back there—by which point, it’ll have been two centuries. It’s weird; it’s confusing; it’s not worth worrying about.” I ate another blue square; they tasted somewhat like ravioli—crunchy outside and stuffed with worms that tasted half like cheese, half like chocolate cake. It sounds dreadful, but really it’s not bad when you get used to it. A lot better than the orange squares and gray dumplings, which tasted like rotten fish. The Fred aliens had truly stomach-turning tastes, by and large.
    â€œFly, when I first joined the squad—you remember Gunny Goforth and the William Tell apple on the head duel?—you were my only friend then.”
    I remembered the incident. Gunnery Sergeant Goforth was just being an asshole because he didn’t think women belonged in the Corps—not the Corps and definitely not the Light Drop Marine Corps Infantry—and no way in the nine circles of hell, not by the livin’ Gawd that made him, was Gunnery Sergeant Harlan E. Goforth ever going to let somepussy into Fox Company, the machoest, fightingest company of the whole macho, fighting Light Drop!
    He decreed that no gal could join his company unless she proved herself by letting him shoot an apple off her head! And Arlene did it! She stood there and let him take it off with a clean shot from a .30-99 bolt-action sniper piece. With iron sights, yet.
    Then, with a little malicious sneer on her lips, she calmly tossed a second apple to Goforth and made him wear the fruit while she did the William Tell bit. We all loved it; to his credit, the gunny stood tall and didn’t flinch and let her pop it off his dome at fifty meters. After that, what could the Grand Old Man do but welcome her to Fox, however reluctantly?
    Back in the Freds’ mess hall, Arlene continued, nibbling at her own blue square. “You’re still my best and first, Fly. But Albert was the first man I really loved. Wilhelm