Dark Powers Read online

  Suddenly the Pursuer appeared again, looking like an enormous squid about to swallow a minnow. Rick shook off his sense of unreality and slugged Lron in the arm to get his attention. “How come it can track us now?”

  Lron made wuffing sounds of amusement. “We set up a Protoculture homing device in the center of the ship, see?”

  Rick saw; it was a beacon on the computer-driven schematics off to one side. “Listen, Lron: I’ve been doing some thinking, and—”

  He was interrupted as an especially heavy blow from the Tiresian atmosphere nearly sent him sprawling; Lron had caught him. Amazons and crystal people and foxlike Gerudans were struggling out of the heap they had ended up in.

  “—and if this Pursuer of yours had the kind of warhead you’re talking about, we’re gonna end up fried right along with it when the SDF-3 and the GMU start blazing!”

  Lron’s muscles stood out against his pelt as he wrestled the wheel around, while holding Rick in place with his free hand. “Do you think we’re stupid?”

  “No-no-no,” Rick responded weakly, as Lron spun the gargantuan wheel and the ship took up its approach.

  The Pursuer had its target at last: a bright, strobing Protoculture marker at the center of Farrago. It plunged down. It knew its opponent’s performance profile from computer analysis and hard experience, knew that the lumbering Sentinel vessel couldn’t possibly pull out of its dive or avoid the final destruction of Pursuer’s detonation.

  The guidance AI’s death was near; it cut in auxiliaries, eager for that moment.

  Rick clung to the wooden wheel, looking back through the bridge’s clear blister to where the Pursuer was already a discernible speck in the cosmos.

  Lron virtually handed Rick over to Crysta. “You’re right!” Standing at the wheel, the bear-being pressed the titanic circle against its stem, deepening the dive. “It’s almost time to go! Well? Tell your mate and your people! That thing will be in their laps in another minute!”

  Rick struggled to be heard over the winds that bucked and jostled the ship. “What’re you talking about? It’s following us!”

  Lron made a sawing sound that Rick took as laughter. “No time to explain! Hold on!”

  Rick didn’t have to, because Crysta scooped him up. The smell of her fur was actually rather pleasant, rather relaxing.

  Rick, seeing parts of Farrago fly in separate directions, suppressed a certain sadness that he and the REF hadn’t been able to do much to help the Invid’s victims. It was just bad luck; he waited to die.

  Then he saw that the bridge was ascending.

  Lisa saw it, too, from her place in the GMU: the Farrago was an amalgamation of the prizes of war, and now the components had broken away.

  A module like a streamlined, art-deco grasshopper arced away in one direction; a thing like a glittering bat deployed wings and banked in another. Diverse segments headed toward every point of the compass.

  Suddenly, the only thing remaining where the Sentinels’ ship had been was a blinking transceiver package attached to a rocketing, remote-guided paravane. It lined itself up and then glided right down into the cross hairs of SDF-3’s main gun and the GMU’s monster cannon, while ordnance from the VTs closed in.

  The creatures so used to sleeping through the long night of Tirol in its transit behind Fantoma were stirred by the light. Something as bright and hot as a sun burned above, interrupting their hibernation.

  But then the glare died, and the darkness took charge of the moonscape. The things that lived in Tiresian soil and water went back to their sleep, even though long, low-register sound waves shook them.

  In the barely flightworthy framework of what had been the Farrago, which was attached to the big Karbarran vessel that was its largest single component, Bela wiped away the crimson seeping from the bloody nose Rick Hunter had gotten when he lost his footing.

  She dabbed at it with the snow-white headband she had worn under her metal war helm. Rick looked through the blister, down at Tirol and the expanding ball of gas that had been the Pursuer, and the far-off spacecraft that had been parts of the Sentinels’ battlewagon.

  “When we saw through intercepted messages how soundly you Humans and your Zentraedi friends whipped the Invid on Tirol,” she was telling him, “we thought you’d make good allies. But now we know for sure it’s nice to meet you, friend.”

  She had his right hand in a kind of clasping grip, but a moment later she had his hand open, examining it, while Rick tried to make the compartment stop spinning.

  “Not much callus,” Bela observed. “How do you keep your sword from rubbing your skin raw?”

  Rick shook his head, little neuron-firings making stars seem to orbit before his eyes, trying to figure out how to answer her.

  Just then, there was an angry growl from Lron, who was overseeing the rejoining of the sundered parts of the Sentinels’ ship. From what Rick could make out, it had something to do with a master junction that was located down near those impossible peat furnaces.

  “Battle’s over, so Crysta and Lron will be demoralized for a while,” Bela said, releasing Rick’s hand. “They’re really quite dour, much of the time. Like all Karbarrans: morbid, always preoccupied with Fate and all of that …”

  She snatched his hand back for a second, taking a longer look at his palm. “I don’t think you’re in for a very long or serene life, by the way, Admiral.”

  “No surprise there,” he muttered, taking his hand back and frowning at it. Then he looked to Bela again. “Listen, this ship, you Sentinels—it’s all so fantastic! How did you put together a fighting alliance like this? How did you assemble such a starship?”

  They were on their feet once more and the other envoys had gathered round, except for Lron, who was still at the helm. “We didn’t,” Burak said. “The Invid did, by imprisoning us together.”

  When Rick asked, “But how’d you turn the tables?” everyone looked to Veidt. A moment or two elapsed while Veidt considered the question.

  “I think you’d better come with us,” Veidt said. “It will be more to the point to show you … certain things … than to talk about them.”

  A few minutes later, Rick stood at the barred cage that had once housed the ship’s menagerie—Karbarrans in this case, if he was any judge of scent. But what lay moaning and clanking its shackles was nothing like any Karbarran, or any other Sentinel.

  He spoke into a commo-patch mike the Sentinels had somehow crafted for him in their careless, make-do fashion. The microphone looked like some kind of jet-black motion-picture trophy, while the outlandish earphones were so big that he had to sort of drape them over his shoulders. The whole time, he was looking at the thing before him—the Sentinels’ prisoner.

  “Lisa, don’t bother asking me to describe what they’ve got here, please. Just get a couple of security platoons over to me on the double. And interpreters, recording equipment, a couple yards of anchor chain, some portable sensors—oh, babe, send the whole toyshop over here!”

  He could hear a certain iciness in her voice. “Understood. Keep me posted, if you’ll be so kind, Admiral.”

  One part of him berated itself for having hurt her feelings so; but most of Rick Hunter was simply staring, a-ghast, at what crouched in the cell.

  CHAPTER

  FIVE

  It was almost as if I had called up something from the unformed, the ultimate Potential, into existence. The appearance of the Sentinels was the answer to my every requirement, in the wake of the vast power I had secretly wrested from the Invid, power I was as yet unable to exercise.

  There are a few individuals in the timestream of this universe who have been granted the gift of sheer Will, to mold events according to their desire. I am one of them.

  Or perhaps, in a way, I am all of them.

  General T. R. Edwards, personal journal

  “Not a mere scientist,” the Invid corrected sharply, with a rattling of manacles that made some of the guards put their hands to their pistol but
ts. “I am Tesla, Master Scientist to the Invid Regent! Now, release me, you pitiful lower life-forms!”

  Tesla turned his huge wrists, testing the strength of the forged-alloy shackles the Sentinels had put on him. His grainy green skin rasped against the metal. He stretched the three thick fingers of both hands and flexed the opposable thumbs. “Release me, I say! Or you will feel the vengeance of the Invid!”

  Tesla was a creature about ten feet tall, with a thick, reasonably humanoid torso and limbs. But his head was a slender extension resembling a snail’s snout, with two huge black liquid eyes set on either side. At the tip of the snout were two sensor antennae like glistening slugs that glowed whenever he spoke.

  Rick found himself looking at those eyes, much as he tried to avoid it, while Lang and the others made their recordings and measurements. The eyes were as unemotional and unrevealing as a shark’s, but they were set forward in the sluglike head. And conventional Darwinian reasoning said that the main purpose for such placement was pursuit—the Invid were predators.

  Just like Humans.

  Rick had yielded the floor to the astounded sci/tech squads from SDF-3 who had come in answer to his call, to evaluate Tesla and try to gain some kind of understanding of the bizarre turn the whole mission had taken.

  Rick had a towel around his shoulders, wiping his forehead from time to time; he suddenly realized that Veidt was hovering near.

  Wasn’t he on the other side of the compartment a second ago? Oh, well. “Ah, Lord Veidt—”

  “ ‘Veidt’ will suffice,” the being corrected.

  “Okay, okay, ‘Veidt,’ then: I guess we need to know first things first. You Sentinels aren’t so much in a shooting war with the Invid as trying to put together an uprising, right?”

  Veidt hesitated, and Rick threw the towel to the deck. Some of his blood was drying on it, scarlet going to rustred. “Let’s save fine distinctions for later! Am I right or am I wrong?”

  “You are right,” Veidt said as he and Rick and the Sentinels watched the Human sci/tech teams push and shove each other to get closer to Tesla. “Once, the Invid and the Zentraedi savaged this entire part of the galaxy, fighting their war. With the collapse of that struggle, contact with all the outlying stellar systems has been lost.

  “Now, the war has boiled down to the few habitable planets in this close stellar group: Tirol, Optera, Haydon IV, Geruda, and the rest. The ability—and perhaps the will—to venture out into the horrible aftermath of the great Invid-Zentraedi wars has been lost, Admiral.

  “But, as I have said, you’re right. The worlds unlucky enough to be here in the ‘close stars’—accessible with non-Protoculture superluminal drives—are still under the Invid heel. Yet, time and history and the Shapings of the Protoculture have their own rhythm, Admiral. And while the … slavery!… we’ve suffered, the cruelty and mis-treatment, may not be high on your Earthly agenda, the war to free the Near Planets is the thing that unites the Sentinels in a blood oath.”

  Veidt was quivering like a tuning fork; Rick had thought him robotic and cold, but he now saw passion in his face. “We were in cages. Do you know what that’s like, young Admiral? To be caged like an animal?

  “Of course you don’t! The Sentinels will accept you as allies, and enlist others who are willing to fight, but I’ll tell you something, Admiral Hunter: none among us will ever feel quite the same bond with anyone who wasn’t caged with us—trust them to fight, as we intend to, until we win or until we die!”

  Rick thought for a moment about Earth history. Of monstrous freight trains and mass gas chambers. He picked the towel up off the deck, folding it carefully. “Fair enough.” He looked to Veidt. “But we’re going to help you. And if you want to know why, just look through our ship’s history files.”

  Veidt nodded as if he already had. “We have all agreed to recrew this ship, if possible, and set course for Karbarra. Without delay.”

  “What? Wait a second!” There would have to be meetings, resolutions from the council, personnel allocations, resource diversion, interdivision liaison, staff meetings, marital counseling, maintenance checks …

  “What d’ya mean, ‘without delay’?”

  “I mean that within twenty-four of your hours, we intend to depart,” Veidt answered in a reasonable tone. “Would ten days be better? Or ten months? You may multiply the beings who will die under Invid tyranny by the minute!”

  “All right; you’ve made your point,” Rick grunted in a sound like something Lron would make. “I guess it’s doable.” He was staring over at the people who seemed to be prepared to climb into the cage with Tesla to get good shots of him.

  So that’s the enemy. Or at least one form of him. “He was your, your zookeeper, right?” Rick asked Veidt.

  “I think the words coincide,” Veidt allowed. “Though I suppose Tesla had much more unhappy plans for us. Why?”

  “How’d you beat him?” Rick pressed. “How’d you take the ship?”

  “Ah. Well. Sarna and I were chained by the neck—no arms, of course—and fed by Invid functionaries, from beyond a line they’d drawn on the deck. But after some time we came up with a way to eradicate their line, and draw one of our own, a line much closer to us. The rest was even simpler than fooling the Invid.”

  So all this apparent limblessness didn’t mean that Veidt and his kind couldn’t knock some Invid out of commission, although they had perhaps used a method that had nothing to do with savate or tae kwon do. Rick filed the information in his memory, and was about to get on to matters at hand, when he heard a mighty roaring.

  The Invid Master Scientist, Tesla, wasn’t happy with Sentinel protocol. Praxian amazons harried him with electrified prods; Karbarran deck apes jostled him in rude fashion—preparing him for interrogation. Not a single Sentinel showed any excessive brutality, but not a single one showed the least kindness, either.

  In that moment, long before his conversations with the Plenipotentiary Council or his consultations with his wife, Rick Hunter understood that the Sentinels would do just what they had pledged one another: win or die.

  And he knew that he would go with them, even though it might mean the death of his marriage. But the courage he admired in the Sentinels wasn’t very much different from the courage he adored in Lisa.

  The Sentinels were adamant about their departure schedule, despite the council’s demand for time to mull it over. Then Miriya Sterling came up with a little salesmanship. She considered the problem with a soldier’s insight, and whispered a suggestion into the ear of her husband, Max Sterling, Skull Leader. Max passed it on to Lisa.

  Lisa Hayes Hunter still didn’t know exactly what to feel about the Sentinels’ appearance. Aside from the new crisis it had thrust upon the SDF-3, there was the striking change in Rick. But when she found herself hoping the council would vote not to extend aid to the revolutionaries, Lisa reminded herself of the lives being crushed and extinguished by the Invid.

  So, she took Miriya’s advice, and gave the Sentinel leaders a quick tour of some of the superdimensional fortress’s armories in an aircar. The Karbarrans, in particular, showed their delight at the ranked mecha, howling and pounding the aircar’s railing until they threatened to damage it. The pilot guided them slowly past Hovertanks and Logans, and second-generation Destroids along with armored ground vehicles and self-propelled artillery.

  The women of Praxis, in particular, were loud in their praise of such wonderful war machines. Lisa felt fascinated and a little threatened by their bigger-than-life, bloodthirsty beauty. She looked to her husband from time to time; he seemed lost in thought. But she could tell, could almost hear, what he was thinking, and it made her feel empty inside.

  “Amazing,” Lang kept mumbling, skimming the preliminary reports from the sci/tech people and the intel teams that had gone aboard the Sentinels’ flagship.

  Justine Huxley, next to him at the council table, made an exasperated sound and leaned over to whisper into his ear. “Emil, please! This
is crucial!”

  He wanted to object, to tell her how much more fascinating his data was than more of the endless wrangling and political maneuvering the Sentinels’ appearance had generated. But she was right; even the council sensed the urgency of the situation, and was moving with unaccustomed speed.

  Still, there was a wealth of information the Sentinels had given the expedition teams! Take the drive of that incredible Karbarran vessel, for example. Hunter hadn’t been hallucinating: it was powered by furnaces that consumed a substance analogous to peat or lignite. But the stuff seemed to be some sort of distant forerunner of the Flower of Life itself—an Ur-Flower! And then there was the half myth, half religion that surrounded the ancient being or entity known as Haydon …

  He realized someone was addressing him. “Eh? What was that, Mr. Chairman?”

  Senator Longchamps controlled his temper and began again. “I asked if, in your opinion, it would be feasible for the SDF-3 to accompany the Sentinels and lend her firepower in support of their mission.”

  Lang threw down his papers. “The entire idea is asinine, my dear sir! The damage we suffered is far from repaired, and it will be two years, at the very least, before our primary drive is repaired!

  “But more to the point, the SDF-3 must remain here to insure that the mining of monopole ore goes on uninterrupted. Without Fantoma’s ore, we have no way home. So you see, what the Sentinels proposed is the wisest course—the only sensible one open to us, in my opinion. We must detach what military forces we can to aid them in their cause and at the same time divert the Invid.”

  “I concur,” Exedore said, and Justine Huxley nodded.

  “You tell ’em,” T. R. Edwards smirked from one side, having finished his testimony a short time before.

  Edwards’s sudden willingness to see SDF forces seconded to the Sentinels—his almost eager advocacy of the plan—perplexed and worried Exedore and some of the others. It wasn’t like the man to feel compassion for non-Humans; in fact, his hatred of Zentraedi was well known, and his hostility toward Rem and Cabell was already evident.