Dark Powers Page 6

  He drew a quick breath and then turned away from her for a split second, gathering himself and making sure he had heard correctly. His heart pounded; he had thought he was about to lose her. But she was telling him, in her own way, that she was coming along on Farrago.

  What words were appropriate? None …

  They took one another’s hand and went to the Captain’s quarters. There were not too many hours left until the Sentinels’ flagship must leave.

  They had some packing to do, but that could wait a while.

  CHAPTER

  SEVEN

  BY ORDER OF THE PLENIPOTENTIARY COUNCIL AND IN ACCORDANCE WITH APPLICABLE MILITARY REGULATIONS, THE FOLLOWING PERSONNEL ARE ASSIGNED DETACHED DUTY WITH THE XT FORCE DESIGNATED “THE SENTINELS”:

  Baker, Jack R., Ensign

  Grant, Vincent G., Lieutenant Commander

  Grant, Jeanne W., Lieutenant Commander (Med)

  Hunter, Lisa Hayes, Admiral

  Hunter, Richard B., Rear Admiral

  Penn, Karen L., Ensign

  Sterling, Maximilian A., Commander

  Sterling, Miriya P., Lieutenant Commander

  Wolfe, Jonathan B., Colonel

  (Excerpted from seconding orders, mission

  “Sentinels,” UEG starship SDF-3.)

  “You can handle it,” Lisa assured Commander—now Captain—Forsythe. She concentrated on tossing a few last possessions into a ditty bag. Her quarters—hers and Rick’s—were so stark and cold now, stripped of decor and furnishings, ready for Captain Raul Forsythe, the new occupant.

  Forsythe ran his hand over a forehead rubbed smooth of hair by decades of military-cap sweatbands. “I know I can handle it, Lisa; I’m just not so sure I can do it as well jumping in flat-footed like this. You know how many people alive have ever commanded a superdimensional fortress? Only one: you.”

  “Then, it’s time there were two.” She stopped, having come across something under the blotter on Rick’s desk. It was a laminated snapshot of Lisa as a teenager, looking adorable, with a kitten perched precariously on her head. She had given it to him in a moment when she had thought it was all over between them; she felt a tremendous burst of love for him, discovering that he had kept it so close to him all this time.

  Admiral Lisa Hayes drew a breath to keep from sniffling. “Um, Captain—sir, remember what you taught me at the academy? The first day, I think it was.”

  Forsythe allowed himself a chuckle. “That business about not ‘consolidating knowledge or expertise in such fashion as to present a tactical disadvantage in event of death, disabling, or disappearance of senior personnel’ wasn’t supposed to apply to putting me in the hot seat, Admiral. Lisa.”

  Lisa ran her forefinger along the seam of her duffel bag, its microfield sealing up behind as if she had touched it with a magic wand. She hoisted the duffel, grunting a little, and Forsythe somehow restrained himself from the lèse-majesté of snatching luggage away from his admiral in macho assistance.

  The bag landed next to Rick’s: two remarkably small bundles of strictly personal possessions. Lisa looked back to Forsythe. “Captain, you’ve got more time in the service than I’ve got in life; we both know that. You’ll do fine. If you have any questions, ask the bridge gang; enlisted ratings run that damn place anyway. Mr. Blake and I just let outsiders think otherwise.” That notwithstanding, Blake was accompanying her on the Farrago.

  Forsythe laughed a little, and then Lisa did, too. He remembered the terribly intense and focused cadet—daughter of another Admiral Hayes—who had come to the academy as a gawky, pale, set-jawed, frightened midshipman.

  She put her hand on his shoulder. “It’s time there were two SDF-qualified skippers.” They saluted, then shook hands solemnly.

  She leaned to him, kissed him on the cheek. Forsythe, eyes closed, inhaled the somehow exotic scent of her, and thought wistful thoughts that broke service regs, rationalizing it on the basis of the fact that she would be gone soon. No temptation or threat; just a memory.

  Then Lisa was sniffling again, pulling one of those new-fangled totally-recyclable tissues from a dispenser, blowing her nose, and tossing it into the recycler. Forsythe busied himself with realigning the duffels by the quarters’ hatch. The hatch slid open, and Rick Hunter was standing there.

  “Admiral.” Forsythe touched his cap’s braided brim, and moved past, into the companionway, headed for the bridge. Time to take command.

  Lucky dog! Forsythe thought of Rick Hunter as he went along.

  Rick went to lock his hands around Lisa’s waist, but she kept him at a distance for a moment. “My giving up this ship, dead in space as she is, useless for now as she is, means even more than your giving up Skull. You acknowledge, Skull Leader?”

  He had been taken by surprise, but now he nodded. “I do, Lisa. But the Sentinels need me more than the SDF-3 does, and they need you more, too, and you know that.”

  She inclined her head, perhaps a little unwillingly. “And it works out so well, for you. No more situation rooms, Rick; no more sidelines. We’re about to enter that Ur-Flower furnace that Lang keeps talking about. You’ll be right out there on the edge, and so will Max and Miriya and the others.”

  Only, would that be enough? Or would he find out there was nothing short of flying combat that would satisfy him? She pretended to adjust her duffel’s straps. Somehow, that puerile Minmei song, “My Boyfriend’s a Pilot,” started playing in her head and it took an act of will to exorcise it. Lisa closed a last side-pocket seam, and hoisted her bag up onto her shoulder. “Ready?”

  Rick had been about to offer help, but knew her well enough to know she didn’t want any. He wrestled his own bag onto his shoulder and wondered what he and his wife looked like: the willowy, overachieving-service-brat success story, new captain of the Farrago; and the shorter, maybe-muddled-looking guy at her side who suddenly found himself honcho of combat-operations coordination for the Sentinels.

  “I love you,” he said all at once. Not much of an apology, really, or a rationalization, but the only guidewire there was to his life.

  Her duffel shouldered, she nudged his hip with hers. Lisa had to dip a bit to do it. “Mutual. You know that! But we have to understand each other.”

  She dumped the bag and put both hands on his shoulders, as Rick let his own duffel fall. “I know you were unhappy here. But I know, too, that if the war turns out that way, I’ll be listening to your voice, out there in the Danger Zone, and I won’t be able to do a single thing about it but hope and pray.”

  She could barely keep the resentment out of her voice. “You and I are married; we’re mates for life,” she said, taking him into her embrace and feeling his arms close behind her, the strong fingers locking with a kind of determination.

  Suddenly the resentment was gone; whether it would reappear or not, she didn’t know. Lisa brushed back the thick black hair over his ear. “Husband and wife,” she whispered. She could see a tear fall from his cheek to her uniform’s breast. Her own were streaming, too.

  “It’s a rifle!” Karen Penn hollered, having had about enough.

  “A goddamn projectile weapon, but it’s not a rifle!” Jack Baker screamed back at her, blood vessels standing out in his neck. He was wrestling the huge Karbarran musket around, about to shake it at her if he could get it off the deck.

  Karen was pleased to see that she had gotten a rise out of him. Being stuck down in what was apparently the lowermost hold of the Sentinels’ ship, inspecting alien weapons and recording evaluations for the G-2 staff, would ordinarily have been fascinating, but she was down there with J. Baker, the World’s Most Obnoxious Ensign.

  Now he tried to hold up the Karbarran firearm, its ornate, jewel-set buttplate still planted on the deck. All hand-polished wood and burnished metal fittings, it looked like some primitive work of art. Its wide leather sling was thick with embroidery, and its muzzle was decked with a rainbow of parrot-bright feathers.

  Jack indicated the big, globular fixture jus
t forward of the trigger guard. “Penn, we both agree that there’s a lot of air in here, right? Under pressure, because the Karbarrans jack it in with this forestock lever, right? And it shoots bullets pneumatically, with the velocity of a primitive rifle, Right?”

  She cringed involuntarily as he shrieked the last word. “So!” he concluded, “It … is … a … gun!”

  Karen made a fist, her knuckles protruding, wishing she could punch him. She answered through clenched teeth, “Not by the G-2 guidelines, which specify propellant-ignition or energy. Now, d’you want to turn in a faulty report, or are we gonna list these pump-up blunderbusses properly?”

  Perhaps, she thought, there was some sort of berserk sadist in the assignments office, and that was how she had been thrown in with Baker yet again. That would explain everything, but easy explanations were so often suspect …

  Jack grumbled something she took as acquiescence, and they went back to work. They inventoried the strange-looking weapons of those Praxians—weirdly-conformed naginata, which looked like long halberds with a curved blade at one end and a spike at the other, and short, one-handed crossbows with their grips protected by boiled, shaped leather, and the rest. Swords, shields—the peculiar crystalline Spherian gadgets that looked like frozen lightning bolts—what were two ensigns to make of those, or of a Gerudan grapnel-shaped thing that didn’t seem to come with instructions?

  Jack made terse notes in the aud-vid recorder, wondering at the same time how a girl who was such a sweet armful at a dance could be such an awful pain in the neck on duty. He prided himself on keeping an open mind, but really, he was right and she was wrong, just about always, and some streak of perversion in Cadet Penn seemed to make it impossible for her to admit that.

  Karen, for her part, was thinking of the Praxians and their maleless society. Dynamite! Where could she sign up?

  Jack was inspecting a two-handed longsword that the Praxians used in fighting from chariots, a razor-sharp whip of steel. Suddenly, he lowered it and turned to her. “Look, Penn, I’m not trying to make life tough on you, y’know. It’s just that I take my job very seriously.”

  She was weighing some kind of bulky slug pistol in one hand. “So do I, Baker.”

  Jack suddenly felt very confused. Her honey-blond hair smelled wonderful, and the strange, slightly sloe eyes that were fixed on him were exotically beautiful, as mysterious as any XT’s. And now that he noticed it, her upper lip was longer and fuller than her lower, giving Karen a, well, kind of sexy look, really …

  Except—why did she have to be so damn competitive? Why couldn’t she just come right out and admire him, yield to his judgment, the way the girls back home used to do? “Okay,” he answered her, wondering what in the world he meant. “Okay, then.”

  He held the aud-vid rig out toward her. “Let’s do this right, agreed? You record, and I’ll dictate notes and observations.”

  She put her fists on her hips. “Why don’t you record, and I’ll dictate notes and observations?”

  He felt his lips pulling back to reveal his teeth. “For one thing, because I was the Academy First in military history, and I think I could bring a little extra insight to evaluation of XT weaponry.”

  “Oh, well, pardon me for consuming valuable oxygen! But it so happens I won a New Rhodes scholarship for a thesis in comparative military history, Mister!” Jack let go an exasperated growl and took a half step toward her; Karen raised a precisely folded fist, middle knuckle cocked forward. “And I have a first dan in Uichi-ryu karate. Want proof?”

  He tried to calm down, then lost it. “You just offered the wrong thing to the wrong guy on the wrong day, meat-head!” He began tearing at the fastenings of his torso harness. “I’ll mail your dog tags to your daddy!”

  “That does it!” she shrilled at him, kicking things out of the way for some fighting room. “Where d’you want your corpse shipped, moron?”

  He couldn’t think of a comeback, and so roared like Lron, fighting to get his tunic off. Karen was quartering the air with whistling hand cuts, taking practice snap kicks that reached higher than her head.

  There was a sudden sound from the cargo hold’s out-sized hatch, the deliberate, diplomatic clearing of a throat.

  “Admiral Hunter.” Jack tried to figure out whether he should button back up first, salute, or get busy thinking up the least preposterous alibi he could, even while Karen was bracing to attention and stuttering, “T-T-Tensh-hut!”

  “As you were,” Rick said, wandering in and gazing curiously at the racked Sentinels’ weapons, to give the two cadets a moment to pull themselves together. He sort of regretted intervening; it might have been educational to sit at ringside for a few rounds.

  Now, who do they remind me of? Rick Hunter asked himself. A young hot-dogger VT ace and a pale, intense SDF-1 first officer, maybe? He suddenly felt old, but it wasn’t such a bad feeling, in view of what youth had yet to go through. “Pardon the interruption, Ensigns, but G-1 just cut the orders, and as I was coming aboard anyway to settle in, I thought you’d want to know.”

  They were both a little rocky from the adrenaline of the would-be brawl, and from the surprise of his appearance. It took them several moments to realize that he had promotion orders in one hand and lieutenant jg bars in the other.

  Rick took a secret pleasure in their shock. “Can’t have ensigns assigned to the Sentinels; it muddles the chain of command. Congratulations, Lieutenant; congratulations, Lieutenant.”

  They shook his hand warily, as if afraid it were going to come off, and gazed down at the badges of rank he had put in their palms.

  “Yes; well, carry on,” Rick bade them when he saw that they were going to be flummoxed for a while. He returned their salutes crisply, and resolved not to listen at the hatch to find out what was going to happen next, even though he wanted to.

  “Well? Let’s do it,” Jack Baker said. Tradition dictated a certain ceremony. Karen nodded.

  They silently removed the ensign pips from each other’s epaulets, and fastened the jg bars there. Then they braced at attention and saluted each other, and then shook hands slowly, all without a word.

  “Congratulations, Lieutenant,” Karen echoed Rick.

  “Same to you, Lieutenant,” Jack told her emphatically.

  CHAPTER

  EIGHT

  I felt that my place lay with the Sentinels—with observing and recording a unique event in Human history. But I was a little schizo about it, because I could feel that there were things shaping up at REF-Tirol that the Folks Back Home would need to know about, too. Heroes to be sung and villains to be fingered.

  But one of the first things you learn when they hand you an aud/vid recording rig is that you can’t be every place at the same time.

  Or even two places.

  Sue Graham, narration from a documentary Protoculture’s Privateers: SDF-3, Farrago, Ark Angel Sentinels, and the REF.

  Jeanne Grant paused as she was about to secure the med-center diagnostic robot for transferral to the Sentinels’ ship. As she had done intermittently through the morning, she glanced through the viewport at Tirol, and looming Fantoma.

  “It sure isn’t home,” she muttered again, “but at least we know the dangers here.”

  She felt her husband’s massive arm go round her shoulders. He brushed his lips against her cheek. She reflected again on the oddness of it—how a man so big and incredibly strong could be so gentle.

  “But we’re not needed here,” he pointed out. “Lang will be years repairing the SDF-3, and in the meantime there are people suffering and dying.”

  And so the Ground Mobile Unit was being attached, figuratively and literally, as a new module of the Farrago, secured to the starship’s underside. And Skull Team, now augmented to near-squadron size with Beta and Logan VTs, was now the main component of its assigned air group.

  She clutched his hand. At least there was comfort in the fact that, with the GMU suddenly reallocated to the Sentinels’ mission, Vince wo
uld be near her; she didn’t know if she could have endured being parted from him as she had been before.

  Jeanne took a determined breath to keep back tears, having made up her mind that there was no point to doing any more crying. Vince patted her shoulder. “I know, darling, I know. I miss Bowie, too. But I’m glad he’s safe on Earth, he and Dana both. Rolf will take good care of them.”

  She sighed, leaning her head against his broad chest, wondering what their son was doing at that moment, on the other side of the galaxy.

  On Fantoma, the first dropships began disgorging the mining equipment that the Zentraedi would use to wrest monopole ore from the heavy-g world.

  Breetai stepped out onto the surface in his pressurized armor, stretching his arms and feeling his muscles work. Nearby, heavily shielded and powered mining vehicles were being off-loaded. They looked like high-tech dinosaurs, octopi, centipedes.

  Breetai looked around him at the bleak planetscape, a scoured and blasted vista of grays and browns and black, with a typically high-g scarcity of prominent features; planets like Fantoma quickly pulled down mountains and hills.

  It looked like a haunted world. And it was haunted, in fact: haunted by memories the Zentraedi had accumulated over generations as miners, only to have those memories wiped away by the Robotech Masters and replaced with false ones, implanted glories of the warrior race the Masters needed for their plan to conquer the universe.

  Battlepods came off the dropships, too, to stand guard and serve as security for the operation. Breetai let his subordinates take care of the details, and paced here and there, looking around him.

  Lang and the other Earth savants had expressed surprise that the Zentraedi had been conceived as colossal laborers for the Fantoman mining operation. “If anything, it would seem to me, very small organisms would be more appropriate,” one Human had ventured.

  But that was because they still didn’t understand the exact nature of the sizing chamber, and how it altered Zentraedi physiology to meet the challenges of a gravity more than three times that of Terra.