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She switched off her mike and told the officer, "Keep on trying to raise him." Then she switched to ship's net. "Rick, he's not answering. I think it's a double-cross." She looked intently at the duplicate trigger, on her command console, for the explosives in Tesla's collar.

  "All right; make another approach," he answered from the drop bay. "I'm taking in the last of the reserves, to get our troops back out."

  It was on her lips to object, but she held it in. The lessons of the Praxians had subsumed those of the Academy. Of course you don't leave your buddies in deep trouble, no matter what the cost. She knew it as well as he. It was just that she wished she could make the assault with him and the other units.

  She brought the ship onto a new heading, bearing down on Beroth at low altitude and steady helm, coming to dead-slow. Luckily, the Invid had used up most of their missiles, and their conventional cannonfire and smaller rockets weren't powerful enough to do more than dent the starship's armor and blow away noncritical superstructural features.

  Ark Angel nudged over or smashed a lot of local architecture on its touchdown, lying almost smack in the middle of Beroth. At Rick's command the combat teams charged out to provide fire support for the Sentinels elements still trying to disengage, now that Tesla's forces had abandoned them.

  Lisa saw from the tactical displays that it looked very grim. It was clear that Tesla was

  leaving them in the lurch, having some plan of his own, but there was little the Sentinels could do about it; the Brain's Inorganics were after them now.

  At that moment even the shaky timetable of the withdrawal was set aside. There were sounds of Protoculture weapons fire in the city. Spheris itself cried out in torment.

  Baldan and Teal hosed the Brain and its attendants with steady streams of riflefire, cutting Officers and Enforcers down and leaving streaks of blackening tissue across the sides of the heaving Invid monstrosity.

  The attack had come so suddenly that all opposition was mowed down before there was any chance for the Invid to return fire. With wild elation Baldan thought, We've taken them by surprise. We can kill the Brain and end the battle here!

  But even as he thought that, the floor was heaving beneath him. Protoculture weapons had been fired, and Spheris was reacting in pain.

  His affinity for his world let him understand what was happening. Sympathetic vibrations of a sort only Protoculture could evoke were sending fractures along and between the Crystal Highways, like fractal daggers driven into Spheris itself. Somehow, the mere explosions of mecha didn't produce this phenomenon-perhaps because such bursts were undirected. But the riflefire, minor as it was in comparison to the warfare going on in Beroth, was a different matter entirely.

  Baldan and Teal were knocked off their feet and the Brain was sloshed around in its nutrient pool. Baldan tried to get to his feet and shoot the Brain again, but Teal shouted. "No, or you may doom us all! Come, come! Before the Inorganics get us!"

  The floors were already drumrolling to the heavy tread of running Inorganics coming in answer to the Brain's agonized summons. Baldan rose at last, taking his mother's arms and dragging her off the other way. She dropped her rifle and clung to him. They tottered away as the hive shook on its foundations.

  The bend in a corridor brought them up against a sealed security door; the sound of the Inorganics came closer. Baldan backed off and fired at the door over and over, even though he knew it would do no good.

  As the biped mecha came lumbering around the corner, Teal saw the method to Baldan's madness. The floor quaked and shifted, and a prow of icy crystal thrust itself up into sight. Spheris was reacting against its source of pain.

  The upthrust had cut the Inorganics off from their quarry for the moment. Baldan threw down the rifle, took his mother's hand, and veered at the crystal as the hive tilted again.

  They melded with it and were safely away.

  Churning in its nutrient pool, nearly insane with the pain of its wounds, the Brain lost all control. If the slave races were going to use Protoculture weapons, Protoculture weapons it would be!

  Tesla, too, nearly lost his balance as the planet convulsed. The Brain demonstrated its ire a moment later. Weapons pods set on tall masts around the hive opened up. The blasts were highly accurate, hitting Tesla's blinking-eye Inorganics and blowing them part.

  "To the ships! The ships!" he howled, an echo of his mental command. The disguised troop transports were only yards away, but most of his loyal troops were still covering his retreat.

  He dithered, racked by indecision. To flee without the army he had gathered would leave him a wretched outcast once again, but to stay was to be killed, either by the Brain, the Sentinels, or the very planet! Better to live to fight another day.

  "We raise ship immediately!" he screamed, so loud that Burak and Gnea winced.

  The Crystal Highways themselves spasmed. The planet bid fair to tear itself apart. The Spherisians who had trusted the safety of the underground looked at one another.

  "Get everybody back! Disengage!" Rick was nearly hoarse from shouting his commands over the tac net. "Prepare for pickup!"

  It felt as if Spheris was going to come apart at the seams, and the only thing to do was try to get his Sentinels to safety. He had no idea what the upheavals meant for the Spherisians themselves, but there didn't seem to be much he could do for them, except-

  He switched to command freq. "Lisa! Do not use Protoculture weapons! It'll only make things worse down here!"

  That didn't seem to bother the Invid Brain, though. Rays and annihilation disks streamed from the hive's defensive batteries, wiping out every mecha that flashed the signal of Tesla, and whatever Sentinel targets they could find as well.

  The tide of the Inorganics' battle had definitely turned, with Tesla's mecha fighting dispiritedly or simply turning to run, while the Brain's war machines came on relentlessly. Still, for some reason none of the Inorganics were using Protoculture weapons. Some programmed proscription?

  The Brain's gunners were really pouring it on now, and the planet rocked. Rick despaired of ever getting his troops-or himself-out alive.

  Around the perimeter of the hive one head rose from the living rock as if being born from it. Then another emerged, and another. Soon scores were there as the planet swayed and bucked under them. They exchanged looks and unspoken words, then sank back out of sight.

  Tesla wailed as a sudden tremor knocked him from his feet and overbalanced a Crann that toppled across him.

  He fought to keep hold over his troops, to maintain dominance over the transport crews he had taken under his control, and to ward off the Brain's mental attack. But in this latest setback, something had to give.

  Gnea felt her mind pried loose from Tesla's bond. She shook her head, hearing a ringing and seeing lights before her eyes. A voice in her mind said, "Gnea! Quickly! Over here!"

  She spun around and saw Veidt poised not twenty feet away, on a flying carpet. His robes were blackened and punctured where shrapnel or bullets had plucked at them. "Make haste! There are only seconds!" She realized that he had freed her from Tesla's grip.

  Other Inorganics were trying to separate Tesla from the one that had sprawled across him. Gnea grabbed Burak's shoulder. "Come! We're leaving!"

  Burak tried to shake her loose. "Let me be!"

  She knew nothing about the unholy alliance into which Burak had entered with Tesla-how much deeper the Invid's hold was over the Perytonian than over Jack and herself. She just assumed Veidt hadn't been able to wrench Tesla's mental grip off both victims at once.

  So, with Praxian directness, she yanked Burak back around and swung a roundhouse right that tagged him precisely on the chin. His knees buckled but she had him up and over her shoulder in one move. Legs driving like pistons, she crossed the space between herself and the hovering carpet in three bounds, nearly overturning it when she landed on it.

  Veidt kept it steady, however, and it zoomed off toward the approachi
ng Ark Angel, keeping low because of all the conventional firing still going on, and the blasts from the hive. Gnea noticed with interest that the carpet was actually the resilient floor matting from Veidt's cone-flier-a novel way of making an emergency escape conveyance serve double

  duty.

  Evidently, Haydonites could survive falls from considerable heights, she decided.

  Firing from the hive was getting heavier, and all Spheris was straining and shaking. "It seems the Regent's forces will have their revenge no matter what."

  Veidt shook his head serenely. His mental powers had given him a glimpse of the latest developments. "I think not. See there?"

  Gnea looked where he was pointing and the breath caught in her throat.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

  At least Kyle had victory in his grasp and died with a certain serenity. I guess I just don't deserve either one of those things.

  Minmei

  Two glittering figures stood, hand in hand, gazing at the vast hive of the Invid.

  All around the place, a ring of thousands upon thousands of Spherisians was rising, head and shoulders, from the body of their planet. As that was happening the weapons pylons and gun emplacements toppled or settled into the rock, swallowed by it. The last few, out of kilter, blasted uselessly into the sky then were gone.

  Other batteries were still firing from the hive proper at mecha and parts of the city-the Ark Angel being too far off yet. But the Spherisians were too close to the hive to be in its fields of fire.

  And, safe in that fashion, the thousands rose to join the first two, until they were standing around the hive in a circle several miles in circumference. From where she flew, Gnea could see still more heads appear and then bob back down again, in the direction of the hive, like porpoises heading under a ship. It seemed that the landscape rippled.

  The first two Spherisians to appear-Gnea somehow had no doubt who they were-held out their free hands. All the others linked up, all around the great ring. There was a strange moment of silence then, the Invid guns ceasing fire.

  Spheris shook again, then vast faceted dowels of crystal the size of skyscrapers thrust their points up out of the planet's crust, angling in from every side, going up and up until they formed an irregular apex over the center of the hive's dome.

  The hive trembled-and began to sink.

  Gnea thought there were great counterforces fighting back; the hive seemed to be trying to fight free like a fish caught by a sea anemone. Rock and dust and segments of the hive foundation were flung up all around its sides. But inch by inch it was pulled down.

  A liquid, lucid substance gushed up slowly, hardening as it went, trapping the dome and everything in and around it like flies in amber.

  Veidt had the carpet at a hover now. The firing had stopped everywhere. He and Gnea watched as the Invid stronghold was pulled low and disappeared from sight, the ground closing over it like something alive-like the landscape of Haydon IV, and yet different from it.

  A single united psychic scream came from the Brain and the Invid immobilized in the amber-stuff, as they were drawn, forever unmoving but still alive, deep into Spheris. Every Sentinel and Spherisian winced at it. Then it faded and was gone.

  The Spherisians began melding with their world again, all but the first two, who stood looking at the spot from which the Invid had ruled.

  Tesla had no time to be outraged at the defection-that was how he thought of it-of Gnea and Burak.

  The Brain was gone! The Invid garrison was his to command!

  But at the same time, he was aware of the terrible fate the hive had met, and knew, too, that the Ark Angel was in the area. Though he had an army under his control, he dared not use it there on Spheris.

  He heard a clanging sound and turned to find that some of the more simpleminded Inorganics had gone back to fighting one another. With a mental shriek, he began rallying his forces. They began pouring toward the camouflaged transports.

  "Getting strange power readings from the spaceport," someone relayed the report to Lisa. "Could be Tesla. Inorganics are disengaging and withdrawing that way."

  She jabbed her fist into her palm. He had to be stopped! First Karen Penn had made her report over Bela's comset, then Gnea returned on Veidt's carpet, to fill in gaps in the story; all of it proved that Tesla must be reimprisoned or perhaps even eliminated. And yet there were still wounded being loaded directly into the Ark Angel. She couldn't just seal up and go chasing off after Tesla.

  "Have one Beta do a recon of the spaceport. Get all other available VTs over here to fly security," she snapped. "And have all non-Protoculture weapons stand ready. Keep the Hovertanks on landing-zone-perimeter patrol."

  Rick was helping lug a stretcher over to a cargo lift-all the powered gurneys were long since full-when the sound went through the city. He thought it was an aftershock. But word of movement came from the VTs flying cover; in moments everyone was watching as buildings out at the starport began to fly apart.

  Since Spheris didn't react in pain, Rick assumed the Invid had rigged some sort of repulsion charges rather than using Protoculture explosives. In any event, pieces of what had been assumed to be a hangar complex were thrown outward. Something began rising from the spot where the structures stood.

  Somebody shouted, "I-Invid troop transports!"

  Three of the clamshell vessels were lifting off-troopships bigger than any the Sentinels had encountered before. Rick expected them to open up on Ark Angel for a parting volley, but apparently the appalling fate of the hive had intimidated Tesla.

  The starships rose higher and higher, throwing shadows across the city. Rick wasn't surprised that Lisa held fire; Spheris had been wounded enough, aside from the fact that the planet might react just as violently to the Sentinels' flagship as it had to the hive.

  Tesla watched Spheris sinking away beneath him with a mixture of relief and wrath. His victory had been so close!

  But-perhaps it was better this way. Surely, the Shapings of the Protoculture were leading him toward his rightful, Evolved fate. "Optera," he whispered to himself.

  He had the greater part of the Inorganic garrison with him. From what he could glean from communications logs on the ships, the Regent was now presiding over a Home Hive guarded by a badly depleted army. If he struck before the Regent heard of the outcome on Spheris and could reshuffle forces, Tesla would have the numerical and tactical advantage.

  "Optera," he said, a little louder, to his bridge crew. They hastened to plot the course.

  Once he had slain the Regent and assumed control of half the Invid species, Tesla would lead his race to triumph. There were ways of coping with the Sentinels and the Robotech Masters and the rest that the devolved maggot hiding on Optera couldn't begin to conceive. And once Tesla had the universe beneath his heel, there would be the Regis to

  win. But how could she resist him, Evolved as he was? No doubt, he would conquer her without firing a shot.

  "Optera!" he exulted, and took his first bite from one of the sunflower-yellow, pyramid-shaped Spherisian Fruits of the Flower of Life. The juices ran down his chin and moistened his magnificent robes.

  His aura shone brighter.

  Because the new starships still under construction had no drive units or functioning weapons, Breetai's Valivarre was the only hope of catching Edwards.

  The fact that the hijacked SDF-7 mounted more fire-power and had more fighting mecha aboard didn't deter the Zentraedi giants for a moment; Edwards had made himself their blood enemy. Skulls and others were quickly boarding in their VTs and Hovertanks, even as the Valivarre was casting off, but Wolff hadn't been able to get back through the press of battle.

  "Sorry, Colonel," Breetai said sincerely when Wolff pleaded with him to wait. "Every second counts if I'm to catch that devil."

  But Wolff had his own schedule, and he kept it by getting three Diamondback VT pilots in Battloid mode to add their boost to his own Hovertank Battlo
id's back thrusters. It was a near thing, but he managed to grab the aft section of Valivarre without being roasted by its thrusters, and drag himself to an airlock.

  "Welcome aboard," Breetai said dryly over the intercom.

  Edwards refused to stand and fight, and wouldn't even answer their transmissions. "It's a drag race now," as one Human officer put it. Both ships increased velocity toward lightspeed, but bit by bit the SDF-7 pulled away. And, once superluminal, she could multiply her lead many times.

  "We're losing him," Breetai said in his bulkhead-shaking basso. Valivarre had never even gotten within weapons or VT-strike range.