Dark Powers Read online

  An Invid suicide attack got through the Sentinels’ net of AA fire toward the stern, and Vince dispatched Destroid war machines across the outer deck to join a pair of Hovertanks in trying to maintain cover back there. He had his exec double-check with Jean to make sure the sick bay would be ready for casualties, and got back an answer that rattled him.

  “Sick bay standing by, sir, but Lieutenant Commander Grant isn’t there and hasn’t reported in yet. Her whereabouts are unknown at this time.”

  Far below, on Karbarra, the Invid noted the military action being fought high above.

  In accordance with standing orders, certain specialized units were mobilized and moved out en masse, weapons primed. Karbarrans in the street, frozen with dread and hollow-eyed with fear, watched them go. But the big ursinoids could only stand rooted to the spot, and pray.

  Even with the inertial trackers, it was tough to figure out where Lron was leading them.

  Lron, however, didn’t seem to have any doubts. Down abandoned mineshafts, along connections that had been made to drain underground watercourses, and through cavern systems, they made their way, the spotlights stabbing through the utter blackness. Rick had had them moving combat-style at first, wary of attack despite Lron’s reassurance that the Invid were unaware of this underground travel system. But infantry tactics slowed the recon party down considerably, especially since the alien Sentinels were unfamiliar with REF procedures.

  So in time Rick settled on modified procedures, with Lron on point and Jack and Karen taking turns on rear guard, the rest of the group together or spread out somewhat as circumstances dictated. The team moved faster than combat-zone precautions would ordinarily have dictated.

  At one point they passed through a mined-out, shored-up space where an ore seam had been, a place not quite four feet high, though it was fifty yards wide and went on for over two miles. It was backbreaking travel, especially hard on Lron. Their shuffling progress raised a fine dust that had them all black-faced in no time.

  Kami, with his Gerudan breathing mask, was relatively comfortable, and after a while the REF members closed their flight helmets. Lron improvised a face mask from strips of fabric.

  At another point, though, the group rode two ore cars that they powered with energy cells Lron had brought. It was a welcome relief, even with the weight of a planet hanging overhead, and they made good time along the railway.

  Lron and Crysta had explained that the apparently limitless tunnel system had grown up over the years before the coming of the Invid and the Robotech Masters, when Karbarra, a center of industry and trade, had had its assorted rivals and enemies. War production under the planet was seldom slowed down as a result of attack from space, but nowadays much of the system had fallen into disuse and disrepair.

  Sometime later, after a short break to eat and rest, Lron led them into a cavern system of unutterable phosphorescent beauty, and they paced along the brink of an underground lake in which strange, blind, parasollike, glowing things could be seen to swim and drift. The cavern ceiling was like a dome mosaic with jewels of every conceivable color. There were plants that looked like coral formations made out of tiny crystalline needles.

  During the journey, the scouts maintained contact with Rem and Gnea, taking turns raising the shuttle guards at thirty-minute intervals for a commo check. Slightly more than eleven hours after they had started out, Rick formed them up into as good a security perimeter as he could achieve in the confines of the cave, and took Lron aside.

  “All right; you said we’d reach the first checkpoint two hours ago, but I don’t see it around here yet. And don’t give me any more of this ‘it’s just ahead’ stuff, I’m warning you.” Every muscle ached, and sheer fatigue was making him edgy and paranoid, fearing a trap or a terrible screwup that the big XT was afraid to admit.

  Lron rumbled, “If we’d moved as quickly as Karbarrans are used to, we would have been there long since, Admiral. But never mind; a hundred paces or so—my paces!—along that way over there will bring us to the beginning of our ascent. If you can keep up with me for another hour—two at the most, if we go slowly—we will sleep tonight in a cave overlooking one of the Invid outposts in the Hardargh Rift.

  “And in the meantime, do you realize what we’ve passed under? Inorganics; flying Scout patrols; prowling packs of those murderous Hellcats; formations of Enforcers in their skirmish ships; Terror Weapons drifting along on their surveillance routes; and more! Save your breath on this final climb, little Human; you’ll need it to do some gasping when you realize how far we’ve come.”

  Now it was Rick’s turn to grunt. Talk’s cheap; let’s see you prove it! But he kept the remark to himself, trying to avoid more friction. Instead, he turned and whistled; then, with voice and hand signals, formed up his tiny command to move out again.

  They had barely reached the beginning of the long ascent when Rem contacted them with word of the new battle.

  When things go wrong around here, they really do it in rows, Lisa thought, but there wasn’t much time for regret. Reports coming in to the bridge indicated that the Skulls had repulsed the enemy attack, inflicting extremely heavy losses; the few Invid survivors were limping for Karbarra, their saucer troopships having been blown to particles by the GMU’s big gun.

  There had been losses in all Sentinel combat elements and the ship had suffered damage. Skull had lost two Betas, an Alpha, and a Logan, and several other VTs were badly damaged. Rick’s group was standing pat in a relatively safe position, apparently, but a pickup was impossible, and it looked like the whole recon would be a failure. Lisa refused to think about what would happen if the Invid garrison’s heightened state of alert on Karbarra meant that the shuttle was permanently pinned down in its present location.

  And perhaps most shocking of all, Jean Grant had been absent from her post in time of combat. Lisa still didn’t have all the details, but it involved Crysta and the Invid scientist, Tesla. Whatever it was, it had old Cabell about ready to throw a fit.

  “Report,” Lisa snapped. Subordinates reassured her that things were being seen to. Damage-control parties were already at work, casualties being attended to by various Sentinel healers and the medical staff. Skull was refueling and rearming in case of another hot scramble, but that didn’t seem likely for the moment; apparently the Karbarran garrison had been stripped of its spacecraft, or else didn’t care to launch a counterstrike quite yet.

  Not after the way we’ve bloodied their snouts twice running, she thought with a small glimmer of satisfaction. Lisa issued orders that the flagship be held in orbit, and added, “I’ll be down in medical.”

  Her first thoughts upon entering the big compartment where Jean Grant’s medical labs abutted the hole set aside for Cabell’s equipment and research was, This must be a violation of the Geneva Accords!

  Even though the Zentraedi had shown no impulse to obey the Rules of War, and the Robotech Masters and the Invid were no better, the Human race had made it a point of honor not to sink into unnecessary cruelty. And that was most definitely what this appeared to be.

  How else could you explain Tesla’s being suspended inside an enormous glass beaker of greenish fluid, only the end of his snout sticking up into the air, and all sorts of electrodes and sensor pads connected to various parts of him, particularly his head?

  “Admiral, please do not jump to conclusions,” Cabell hastened. “The Invid isn’t being hurt, and what we’re finding out here may change the course of the war.” Veidt and Sarna, looking on, nodded agreement.

  Tesla objected loudly, “Not hurt? They torment me with their probings! They strip me of my dignity and take the vilest liberties with my person! They seek to slay me through sheer fright, so that they may dissect me. Save me!”

  He thrashed a little in the cylinder. Jean Grant looked up from reading her instruments and rapped, “Be still. Or do you want me to hand you over to the Karbarrans? I bet they could get some information out of you, if I told them you’ve been
holding out on them all this time!”

  The thought of that made Tesla suddenly quiet down and float, trembling. Jean turned to Lisa. “I’m coming up with a sort of lie detector for Invid. At least I think I am. About all I can tell so far is that he’s got high concentrations of Protoculture-active substances in various parts of his body, especially his skull. And their composition and signature varies quite profoundly. It’s like some weird variation on a lymphatic system—and hormones, endocrines—but bizarre alien analogues, of course.”

  Lisa put aside the list of questions she’d like to put to Tesla. “But why are you doing this now, Doctor?”

  Jean gestured to a corner, where Crysta slumped against a bulkhead. “I finally got Crysta to tell me why the Karbarrans have been acting so strangely. Lisa, the Invid have their children in a concentration camp. At the first wrong move from the populace down below, or in the event a defeat of the garrison becomes imminent, the Invid will kill every cub on the planet.”

  Lisa spun on Crysta. “Why didn’t you tell us before?”

  Crysta was actually wringing her pawlike hands. “The Invid had been an occupation force, had made us work for them, but they’d never forced us to fight for them, never made actual slaves of us. They knew we could not stand for that.

  “But we didn’t understand how truly evil they were. They’d been preparing their plan for a long time; in a single afternoon, they swooped down to take up thousands of our young, and that immobilized us. You don’t know how precious our cubs are to us, now that our population has dwindled so!

  “And so we were helpless, as the Hellcats and the Inorganics rooted out most of the rest of our children—only some few managed to remain in hiding. My people held a great Convocation, chanting and seeking a Unified glimpse of the Shaping …”

  Lisa had been briefed on it, a sort of religious ceremony that could go on for days, as the Karbarrans sought contact with the Infinite. “The Shaping was that we must not defy the Invid, but that neither could we tell any outsider of our plight! That part of the Shaping was very clear.”

  No wonder the Karbarrans had been against the Sentinels’ simply leaping into the attack with both feet and a roundhouse swing! Their children were hostage, and the big ursinoids had to simply let the crisis carry them along, with nothing but a forlorn hope that circumstances would change—or that they could be changed.

  “That’s why Lron wanted the recon party,” Lisa suddenly saw. “That way, you wouldn’t have told us; we’d’ve seen for ourselves.”

  Crysta nodded miserably. “But now I have transgressed.”

  Jean disagreed. “No, you didn’t. I had a pretty fair idea what was wrong—it was Vince who gave me a clue—and I wormed the rest out of you, Crysta. But don’t worry; the Sentinels didn’t come all this way just to let a generation of children die.”

  She turned back to Tesla. “Okay now, Slimy: Cabell and Veidt are going to ask you one or two questions. If my instruments say you’re lying, I’m gonna zap a coupla thousand volts through that bath you’re in, get me?”

  She turned a knob, and a nearby generator hummed louder. Tesla thrashed a bit. “I—I hear and will comply.”

  Veidt stepped closer to the vat. “There must be a Living Computer controlling the Inorganics below—coordinating and animating them. That much we know. But is it like the Great Brain that was sent on the expedition to Tirol, or is it one of the lesser sort?”

  Tesla bobbed for a moment, studying Jean Grant’s hand on the control. She looked straight back at him. “It is one of the first, one of the most primitive and smallest,” Tesla said, “placed there when one of the earliest Inorganic garrison was assigned to duty on Karbarra.”

  Jean looked at her instruments and turned up the control knob, so that a hum filled the compartment. Tesla churned the green fluid around him and cried, “Stop, aii! I am slain!”

  Jean turned off the apparatus. “Looks like he’s telling the truth.” To Tesla she added, “Oh, shut up! That was just some low-frequency sound and a volt or two.”

  Veidt told Lisa, “That being the case, my wife and I have a plan that may serve ideally.”

  Lisa was giving instructions at once. “Get the rest of the leadership together for a briefing, ASAP. And have the intel people get all the information they can from the Karbarrans aboard ship; now that the cat’s out of the bag, they ought to be willing to talk. And somebody get that recon party on the horn and tell them what we’re up against!”

  In the abandoned mining camp, Rem frowned as he listened to the word from the Sentinels’ flagship. “But how can—I don’t understand why—”

  “You’re not required to understand, soldier,” a commo officer barked at him. “Just relay the message, word for word, exactly as I gave it to you. At once, do you understand?”

  “I understand,” Rem replied sullenly. “Ground-relay base, out.”

  He broke contact, grousing to himself about the high-handed tone these Human military types took with each other and everyone around them. As Cabell’s pupil and companion and sometimes protector, he wasn’t used to being treated like a lesser intellect or an unimportant cog.

  He was switching over to the recon party’s freq when he realized he felt a stirring of air, and it came to him that Gnea hadn’t spoken or made a sound in some minutes. The shuttle hatch was open.

  Stay buttoned up, had been Admiral Hunter’s order, and no wandering around! Confinement and inactivity had chafed on the free-spirited amazon more than it had on Rem, who had been forced to sit out most of the terrible Invid onslaught on Tirol in a bunker.

  He went to the hatch and peered around, then let out a yell. Overhead, Gnea guided Hiladarre through slow banks and turns, getting used to guiding her. “Is she not beautiful?” Gnea called down, plainly pleased with herself.

  “Come down!” Rem shouted. “You know our orders! We’re to stay hidden, and not attract attention!”

  She sniffed, “Mere males do not give orders to the warriors of Praxis! Besides, I’m tired of sitting in that machine-reeking ship. And who is there to see us, so far from any settlement or outpost? Go back in, if you’re afraid.”

  Rem had a mind to close the hatch and leave her outside, too. And there was the urgent need to relay the awful, bewildering message about the Karbarran children. But he knew that Hunter had experience with war, and that extreme caution was always advisable when one was dealing with the Invid.

  He took a few steps further into the open, craning his neck to look up at her. “If you’re through with your little games, you can act like a solider, and—”

  He was stopped by a voice-processed growl, a feline hunting cry as uttered by a terrifying machine. A Hellcat had come around the shuttle’s bow, moving to cut him off from the hatch. A second appeared at the stern, and let out a scream of pure catlike anger.

  CHAPTER

  FIFTEEN

  Consider the sentient “Tiresiod” brain—Praxian, Terran, Karbarran or what have you. Roughly one hundred billion-plus neurons. The potential number of connections these neurons can make with one another, according to some calculations, exceeds the total number of atoms in the Universe.

  One sets mere machinery against such a creation only at some risk of unlooked-for results.

  Cabell, A Pedagogue Abroad: Notes on the Sentinels’ Campaign

  Bela saw the Hellcats, too. Rem wondered why their presence hadn’t registered on the much-touted sensors of the winged horse. Perhaps Gnea’s flying lessons had distracted it.

  The Hellcats, their slitted eyes glowing like coals, stalked closer. They were a form of four-legged Inorganic mecha, so jet black that they shone with blue highlights, and much bigger than the biggest saber-tooth that ever lived. The Hellcats were armed with razor-sharp claws, sword-edged shoulder horns and tail, and gleaming fangs.

  Rem had kept an Owens Mark IX mob gun nearby in case of trouble, but not near enough; the short, heavy two-handed weapon and its shoulder-strap-equipped power pack were l
ying near the inner side of the hatch beyond reach as the two Inorganics moved toward him.

  That left only the pistols he and Gnea were wearing—and from what Rem had seen on Tirol, it took more stopping power than the heavy handguns had to put down a ’Cat. Rem backed up slowly, step by step, the Hellcats padding after; they were gaining a little each second but savoring the moment, not quite ready to pounce.

  Then he recalled the saddle scabbard Bela had mounted on Halidarre, with its Wolverine rifle. “Gnea, do you have—”

  Somehow, his voice triggered the Robotech beasts, and they both slunk forward, segmented tails lashing, preparing to spring. Rem tugged at his pistol, doubting he had time to get a single shot off, doubting that Gnea could take accurate aim from a banking winged horse even if she did have the Wolverine.

  The Hellcats sprang just as something brushed past him and he felt himself struck from above and behind. Or at least, that was what he thought. The next thing he knew, he was being hoisted aloft, held against Halidarre’s saddle, by the Robohorse’s lifting fields and beating wings, and by Gnea’s firm grip on his torso harness.

  The lead ’Cat almost got him, its wicked claws sliding along Halidarre’s flank but leaving no mark. The horse banked, eluding the second ’Cat’s aim, and gained altitude. A sizzling bolt from Gnea’s pistol missed both felines.

  “Your jostling spoiled my aim!” she scolded Rem, as he kicked and grabbed wildly for purchase. Then, between her hauling and his struggling, she had him up and draped over the saddle bow, belly-down.

  Rem thought the horse’s power of flight would save them from the surface-bound Hellcats, but he could see he was wrong. One was already leaping up a small hill of discarded equipment and stacked crates with astonishing speed, giving chase. His field of vision was severely limited by Halidarre’s neck, body, and wing, and by Gnea; he couldn’t see where the second ’Cat had gotten to.