World Killers Page 3

  Come on, come on, Jack urged his mecha silently. And at last there was the sliding of components as the Alpha began folding and reconfiguring, its shields following suit.

  All at once the blazing inferno burst away from the Alpha in all directions like an outlashing nova. The VT had become a Battloid, Humaniform, like a knight in armor, fists cocked, riding ribbons of thruster fire.

  Jack gasped, trying to catch his breath. He checked around and saw Kami's Beta, and

  Janice's Alpha, with Lron's Beta close-by. All were in Battloid, shimmering with heat waves but still intact and under control.

  Jack spotted Learna-a little rocky but apparently getting things under control. But...

  "Crysta!"

  He heard the ursine growling of the female Karbarran, more angry than afraid, as her Beta whirled and tumbled groundward. It was still in fighter mode, its power failing. Jack imaged his systemry and went after her like a high-diver.

  Something came into his field of vision and he realized that Janice Em was nearby, her Alpha in Battloid, too, plummeting alongside him for the seemingly doomed effort to save the falling Beta.

  "Don't touch it unless your shields are up!" Jack yelled; Crysta's mecha was still aglow with the energy "antibodies." He took a deep breath, and imaged his command to his Battloid. It reached out and seized the Beta.

  It was like trying to bulldog a whirlwind. The heavier Beta spun and tumbled, nearly shaking the Alpha loose, the Alpha's amazing Robotech strength notwithstanding.

  But Jack clung and, bracing his feet against the fuselage, began prying at the wings, straining to help it go into mechamorphosis. At least, to his relief, the Haydon antibodies that were infused with the Beta's protective mantle didn't attack him or slide from Crysta's shields over to his own.

  Then Janice grabbed the Beta from the other side, and together they fought to save their companions. "Crysta, try for Guardian, do you copy?" Jack had to strain to get out his words as he was thrown around against his harness. "Guardian!"

  Jack figured that the Beta might be able to achieve the intermediate mode between Fighter and Battloid, and perhaps it would be enough to save those within. Crysta had only recently completed her pilot training, but she kept her cool with bearish Karbarran fatalism, and did her best to obey.

  The attempt to mechamorphose didn't appear to be having any effect, though the Beta's components were straining against one another and seemed ready to fly apart. The efforts of the two Battloids had slowed its fall, though, and Crysta had a bit more control.

  Lron, who had been pacing the others in a steep dive, along with Kami and Learna, called out, "Jack, I see water, a large body of it!" There was panic in his voice, but he was calming himself because that was the only possible way to help his mate.

  There might be hope yet. "Where?" Jack barked.

  "Over in the opening in the terrain, where those energy things came from."

  Jack swore: salvation in the lion's den? Not likely. "Crysta, you're gonna have to try to eject. Right now!"

  She growled, "I cannot, Jack; ejection mechanism won't respond." There was a kind of abject keening noise in the background of her transmission-the Invid scientist she was carrying, no doubt.

  Though the two Battloids had slowed the Beta's fall, they couldn't stop it. "Okay then: we shoot craps. It's bath time, Crysta! Brace for a splashdown!"

  Lron, Learna, and Kami closed in, too, applying all thrusters to help slow Crysta's fall and shove her ship into position over the large underground lake or sea that Learna had spied. The distant sparkle of the water pinwheeled up and up at them with frightening speed. In the last seconds, they were able to reduce the speed of their fall-then the water smashed into them.

  Jack felt as if his neck had been snapped, and he was aware of water bubbling and surging against his canopy. Any conventional aerospace craft would have broken or sprung a thousand leaks, but somehow the Alpha held. Jack broke the surface to see Lron's Beta still fighting desperately to keep Crysta's afloat.

  Jack hit his burners and lifted clear of the water on trails of blue flame. Crysta's ship was no longer encased in the energy antibodies, but its fuselage looked broken, and it was no doubt taking on water. Janice Em's Alpha appeared next to it, helping Lron try to keep it from sinking, the water boiling and hissing from the blast of their thrusters, but it was a losing battle.

  "Just hold on a second more!" Jack yelled. "Crysta, I'm getting you out of there!"

  His Alpha extruded the special manipulator tentacles that were built into all VTs. In another moment, they had stretched forth to open access plates on one of the damaged Beta's nacelles. It only took a moment for them to work the manual controls for the emergency-rescue system.

  The entire cockpit module of Crysta's Beta slid free from the rest of the ship; Jack took it up in his Battloid's armored hands even while his manipulators were retracting. "Okay, get clear! I've got her!"

  Lron and Janice released their hold on the Beta, and it sank from sight in a fountain of

  bubbles and froth, steam rising from the water. Jack had risen clear and was sliding the cockpit module into a special fitting on the underside of his Battloid's right forearm.

  "Just relax and enjoy the ride." Jack tried to sound light-hearted, but he was scanning his new surroundings and checking out his sensors, expecting another attack. He wasn't so sure the VTs could survive another fight.

  "I cannot fathom it," Bela was saying. "Why would this Haydon IV of Veidt's have an underground sea? Is it not, as he and Sarna have told us, a-what was their phrase?- an artificial world!"

  "That's what they said, all right," Janice Em added. "Only, personally, this wasn't what I pictured."

  Nor had Jack. He had imagined a more elaborate kind of O'Neill colony, perhaps, or even a miniature Dyson sphere, but not something truly planet-size.

  But it was indisputably an artifact of some kind. Beginning at the shores of the lake, fantastic underground mountains reared, looking to Jack like living instrumentality-inorganic versions of living forms and ecosystems.

  Veidt and Sarna and the few other Haydonites among the Sentinels had been either unable or unwilling to give exact explanations as to how things worked here, and Jack began to curse them for it now.

  Jan was continuing, "If the whole place really is an artifact, one of their biggest problems would be managing atmosphere and climate. It makes sense that they'd have huge reservoirs of water and ways of moving it around-under the surface and on it and even over it, as precipitation and clouds-"

  "What we should be giving thought to is whether any of those fire-demons still lurk down here," Bela broke in.

  "I see none, nor detect any," Lron reported. The others concurred.

  "Perhaps the machines cannot see or smell us when we're down here," Gnea, the younger amazon, suggested. "After all, they're used to adversaries coming at them from outer space, not stepping inside their very gates."

  Like flies hiding on an upraised flyswatter, Jack realized-which was only a good idea until the swatter's operator discovered the flies' whereabouts.

  The opening overhead seemed to be shrinking, and some members of the team cried out, preparing to lift off and escape. Jack yelled for them to stand fast. "You want those air

  defenses to nail us for good? We're safe for now, and it looks like we discovered a back entrance."

  He was less sure than he sounded. The Haydonite defense systems hadn't been challenged in two thousand years (although, granted, they allegedly had cost some local warmonger a few hundred ships that time). Jack had difficulty believing that planetary defenses so outdated could be any match for Robotech mecha. After all, how much trouble would Wolff Pack Hovertanks have with Earth weapons even twenty years obsolete?

  "Now, we've got a transponder fix on the shuttle, and an inertial track," Jack went on. "It looks to me like there's plenty of room for Battloids to make their way along underground. That's how we're
gonna get to Glike."

  There was a muted commotion and then Lron's voice came up over the net. "It seems Tesla doesn't agree with your idea, Jack Baker, but a pistol waved at his snout has him quiet once more.

  "I for one think this is a good plan you have. We can remain out of sight beneath the city, and if we encounter trouble, we always have the option of blasting our way back to the surface."

  Jack bit back his own dark conclusions on what an unfortunate recourse that would be. "Jan, you take the point. Lron, drop back and walk drag. I'll be slack man, then Learna, then you, Kami." Jack took up his position at the head of the main body, keeping Janice in sight as she picked out their route.

  He had thought about walking point, but he was in command and responsible for looking after his tiny unit from a more appropriate place. Besides, Jan had proven herself to be amazingly capable-adept at military sciences, mecha piloting, small arms, and hand-to-hand. She even excelled at the archaic weapons of the Praxian amazons.

  These excellent military abilities, coming from a woman whose former claim to fame was as a female vocalist, didn't make a lot of sense to Jack, but just now he was grateful to have her there. Jack watched as, far overhead, the last of the opening in Haydon IV's surface closed out the last few rays of Briz'dziki.

  The VTs waded up from the underground reservoir, shedding waterfalls, as the last of the bubbles rose from Crysta's VT. Jan found a route through a thing that they took for a spillway, some twenty yards in diameter. Though there were some light sources in the labyrinth of living instrumentality, the Veritechs brought up all their wing-lights and spotlights to cut through the gloom.

  Jan scouted several conduits and accessways. Twice, the team pulled back to the brink of

  the sea to start over again because the route had narrowed to a squeeze so tight that the Battloids couldn't get through. The third try was a washout due to extremely high radiation levels; the VTs would protect their occupants for quite a while, but Jack had no idea how long the journey would take, and had no desire to end up as a human night-light.

  The fourth try brought them into a sort of pipeline all aglow with the colors of the rainbow. The sensors couldn't determine what the light effects were, but they didn't seem harmful, and time was wasting. "Let's do it," Jack decided.

  The team moved along like infantry, or SWAT officers, Lron covering the rear in a kind of crabstep, the enormous rifle/cannon of the Beta held at high port. The pipeline's diameter was about thirty feet, not much higher than the Battloids, and so the mecha moved cautiously.

  In some places, the route was lined with pulsing bundles of filament as thick as a mecha's leg-like brilliant gatherings of unshielded optical fibers. In others, intertwinings of mysterious ducting and hoses resembled an incredible Robotech root system. Stupendous struts and support members were the geology of the underground world.

  Gradually, though, the "terrain" started changing. The pipeline widened again, and the Battloids had as much room as foot soldiers moving along a highway. A world of dazzling, incomprehensible supertech complexity surrounded them. Light danced and tremendous loads of power surged and hummed.

  It was a technological reflection of the nearby Arabian Nights cityscape in Glike. But, the manifestations were above, as well as around and below. Ziggurat power-management terminals bigger than any Egyptian pyramid; enigmatic things that looked like Van de Graaff generators the size of the Monument City Sportsdome; megastructures of warped, prismatic light that on closer inspection turned out to be mountains of contoured instrumentality.

  As their route opened up into a kind of open countryside, they began to lose the oppressive feeling of being underground. That is, until Jan's voice came over the net.

  "I'm picking up readings. I think these immunosystems, or whatever they are, are beginning to detect and respond to us again."

  "What? Where?" Jack was punching buttons, searching frantically. "I don't see anything." Don't tell me she's a sensor wizard, too!

  "Trust me, Jack." Her voice was so steady that he believed her. "There's something big ahead, something very big. Perhaps the nexus of everything that Haydon is, and now that we've stumbled so close to it, whatever it is, it's got a line on us again."

  Jack didn't have time to ask her what she was jabbering about, because just then Kami yelled, "Snakes, snakes! Millions of em!"

  Jack whirled even as Kami fired, forgetting the lessons about short, accurate bursts, the Garudan's Battloid hosing its rifle/cannon back and forth like a Robotech fireman.

  The others were blazing away, too. Jack could see that whatever Kami spotted wasn't really snakes; but the undulating, crackling flows of green and yellow streaming toward the VTs would put that image in the mind of almost anybody-especially a Garudan in the hin-altered reality.

  Not that Jack had much time to think; Janice Em was right. Whatever it is we're getting close to, it's got a line on us.

  Like all the other Battloids, he brought his rifle/cannon up, hoping the stress on Crysta and the captive Invid in the backseat of her cockpit hadn't harmed them.

  "Security wheel!" he bellowed over the din of their cannonfire.

  The vast space under Haydon IV was lit by stroboscopic bursts brighter than all the pulses of its power routing, as the Battloids formed a security wheel, backing up until their mighty shoulders grazed one another, firing outward to all points of the compass.

  A sustained burst usually blew one of the energy snakes to dispersing sparks, and the Battloids soon cleared a ring of death around them. But more serpentines of energy were pouring from every crevice. The things massed, too numerous for even Robotech weapons to deal with, and closed in from every quarter like a worldscape of angry vipers.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  It would be fair to say that I have been less than sensitive to the plight of the soldier in the past-have held military types in utmost contempt. I had my reasons, which I have set down elsewhere in these pages.

  But it's just as fair to point out that since I have become one of them-shared their privations and sufferings and rare moments of success, seen their despicable vices and their noble virtues up close-I am a man chastened.

  From the journals of Flight Officer Isle, L., REF Service # 666-60-937

  Minmei had been to REF Base Tirol many times, but never via dark alleys and elevated roadway foundations like some escaped convict.

  She would have been curious about this flight officer-Isle, his nametag said-except that she was feeling sick again and was exhausted after the harrowing flight from SDF-3.

  They had abandoned the Alpha three miles back under the shattered remains of a bridge in Old Tiresia. Isle was successful in dodging his pursuers-they had gone rocket-big off in all directions trying to find him.

  But why wouldn't he take off that flight helmet? Robotech fighter jocks sometimes felt a superstitious link to their thinking caps, but really, this was a bit eerie.

  Lang's R&D. research complex was just ahead. Isle seemed to regard it as safe ground, but Minmei wasn't so sure. Nor would her savior explain why he couldn't simply land the VT at Lang's bailiwick.

  According to the transmissions they had heard during the descent from the superdimensional fortress, Edwards was stripping much of his REF command for forces to pursue Breetai and the Valivarre. But Minmei knew that Edwards would never let her go, no matter what the circumstances.

  Nevertheless, her small hand was in Isle's gloved one as he led her into an alley across a huge plaza from a rear gate of Lang's domain. But in front of the gate a quarter-mile away, mechanized troops from Edwards's ground forces were confronting Lang's security people. Obviously, Edwards had moved quickly to bottle Lang up and seal him off. Quite probably, Lang hadn't even the vaguest idea why.

  Isle was unshaken, reversing field and pressing her back into the darkness. Just then two patrolling infantry went by across the plaza and one almost idly shone his light into it, picking out Isle and Minmei.
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  Isle turned with iron calm and led her back the way they had come, but by then there was a sound of pursuit: sirens and Hoverbikes and jeeps, tracked vehicles, yelling and crackling static on portable comsets.

  A searchlight stabbed down from somewhere high overhead, and then several more lit the area. Isle pressed himself and Minmei up against a wall when one ranged close; then it moved on.

  But, with a blaring of engines, a Hovertank pulled to a squealing stop at the far end of a back street, right in then-path. Two squads of infantry rushed to block the opposite end, trapping the two between rows of blank buildings.

  Isle pushed Minmei against a wall and produced a huge magnum machine pistol, the kind she had heard the soldiers call Badgers; non-Robotech, but murderously effective.