Approximately twenty minutes had passed since the unidentified dreadnought was spotted, and it was nearly upon them. Yet it had not responded to any visual or electromagnetic signal. Peace was important to her, but so were the lives of her crew and the survival of her command. She was as edgy as any enlisted-rating gunner, but didn’t have the luxury of simply hoping she could shoot first.
And, the SDF-3 was only partially combat-worthy; letting the enemy get to close range might mean ultimate disaster. Still, the REF mission had to mean something more than crossing the galaxy only to fight battle upon battle, had to mean more than war without end.
She went over every detail, to see if there wasn’t one more preparation she could make. Lisa looked around the bridge. There was the same small bridge watch-gang setup that her mentor, Captain Gloval, had used, except that the three enlisted-rating techs were male, as were the watch officer and Lisa’s exec, Commander Forsythe.
Rick and the other officers from the Tactical Information Center—the ship’s cavernous command, communications, and control facility—kept up the flow of information, but none of it was very helpful. The Plenipotentiary Council, the civilian body in overall control of the Robotech Expeditionary Force, had convened just long enough to give Lisa operational control over the situation; they were satisfied that she wasn’t trigger-happy, and that she was well aware of the dicey tactical dilemma.
Veritechs were scrambled, sent out to block the newcomer’s way, and intercept and engage if necessary. Alphas, Betas, and Logans were deployed to their appointed places. Lisa’s eye found the tactical display symbol for the Skull team for a moment, and she thought of Rick—trapped down there among the rows of consoles and techs’ duty stations, monitors, and instruments. She knew he was longing to be out there with his beloved former outfit.
She supposed his heart was even more with them in this moment than it was with her. If so, that was something she could understand, could forgive, as long as he carried out his current assignment.
She thrust the thought aside; the Veritechs were coming within range of the unidentified dreadnought. Although the ship was as big as any Earth battlecruiser, it was still far smaller than the mammoth SDF-3. It maintained its worrisome silence.
According to the rule book, the next step should be a close flyby, performed by VTs—a warning to the intruder. If there was still no acknowledgment, it would be time for a shot across the battlewagon’s bow.
She found herself about to order Ghost in for the flyby, avoiding the use of Skull, but stopped herself. Although Rick would want to be with his old outfit in the thick of things, he would just have to maintain his duties as a commander. Edwards was too rash—he might even enjoy goading the newcomers into a shooting incident. Max Sterling, who had taken over Skull, was a more reliable man and the best flier in the REF.
She opened her mouth to give the command to Skull, when one of the male enlisted-rating techs said, “The incoming ship is decelerating, Captain. Changing course for possible insertion to Tirol orbit. It’s deactivating its weapons systems.”
As soon as the tech relayed the information, a female voice from the Tactical Information Center came up. TIC commo instruments were intercepting radio transmissions from the newcomer.
When the transmissions were patched through to the bridge, Lisa found herself listening to a strange, voice-processed-sounding garble. But bit by bit, she began to recognize syllables.
“Zentraedi,” Lisa’s bridge officer, Mister Blake, said softly, but Lisa was already turning to have a comline opened to Dr. Lang’s science/research division.
“Respond, please,” the transmissions came, in that strange, processed-sounding voice that might have been computer generated. “Alien vessel, please respond.”
Alien? Lisa pondered as Lang came onscreen. He was flanked by Breetai, and Exedore. Once Humanity’s greatest enemies, these two Zentraedi were now staunch allies.
“Can you speculate on what this means, Doctor?” Lisa asked. “Or Commander Breetai? Lord Exedore?”
It was Exedore who answered, his voice still holding something of the weird Zentraedi quaver, even though he had been Micronized to Human size.
His was the greatest mind of his race, and the storehouse of its accumulated—in some cases, fabricated—lore and history. “The language is Tiresian,” he confirmed, “with loan-words from our own battle language and some elements of the Robotech Masters’ speech. But it is being spoken by a non-Zentraedi, non-Tiresian.
“As for the ship, it fits no profile known to my data banks, although certain portions of it bear resemblances to the spacecraft of various spacefaring cultures.”
“But this is no Zentraedi ship,” boomed Breetai. “Of that I feel sure. Our race conquered thousands of worlds, contacted tens of thousands of species. The language of Tirol became the lingua franca of much of this part of the galaxy. This warcraft might come from anywhere in the entire region, or even beyond.”
All of them heard the next transmission from the battleship. “We come in peace,” that eerie voice said. “We come in friendship. Do not fire! We are desperately in need of your help!”
“Identify yourselves,” a commo officer transmitted in her clear contralto. “Incoming vessel, who are you?”
“We are the Sentinels,” the eldritch voice answered. “We are the Sentinels.”
Down in the TIC, Rick Hunter had a sudden vision of black obelisks and dire events to the tune of Also Spracht Zarathustra.
Lisa looked at the bridge’s main viewscreen.
Suddenly Edwards’s face appeared in an inset at one corner of it. “It’s some kind of trick! Admiral, you can’t let them—”
“General, that … will … do!” Lisa thundered, and blanked him from the screen. A moment later she was talking to the Plenipotentiary Council.
“Ladies and gentlemen, I recommend that we allow the, er, alien ship to land under close escort by our VTs and with its weapons systems inert. We can track it with the SDF-3’s main gun, and cover it with the GMU’s as well, once it’s down. If it turns out that they want to fight, let it be from a position of such tactical disadvantage.”
That touched off a hectic, bitter debate in the council. Some members shared Edwards’s attitude after the almost mindless hatred with which the SDF-3’s arrival had been greeted by the Invid.
It was Lang who cut through the rancor with a single quiet plea, perhaps the most Human thing he had said since that Protoculture boost so long ago.
“My dear companions, we’ve traveled across the better part of the Milky Way galaxy with the express hope of hearing the word they’ve just used: friendship.”
Permission to land was carried unanimously.
Exedore was less the frog-eyed, misshapen dwarf he had once been, thanks to Human biosurgery and cosmetic treatments. It seemed to make people more at ease in his presence, but other than that it meant little to him.
Now he pushed back his unruly mass of barn-red hair and squinted at the readouts as his own data banks interfaced with those of the SDF-3 mainframes, with input from the detectors tracking the newcomer battleship’s descent. As had happened so often in the past, he could feel great Breetai looming nearby.
Exedore, Breetai, and many of the star players of the REF were in the Tactical Information Center. Techs, intel, and ops officers were scurrying around the compartment, which was two hundred feet on a side and half as high, crammed with screens and instrumentation. A main screen fifty feet square dominated the place.
Exedore was matching disparate parts of the newcomer’s hull features with profiles in Zentraedi files. “You see? That portion toward the stern, starboard—it’s Praxian! A- and the section there just forward of midship’s starboard: is that not a Perytonian silhouette, I ask you?”
Nobody there was about to argue with him, but nobody understood what it meant—and neither did Exedore. “It’s as if these Sentinels slapped together a variety of space vessels and united them with a central str
ucture—you see? —to form, oh, I don’t know—a sort of aggregate. Certainly, it’s not a design well suited to atmospheric entry.”
Exedore was correct. The assemblage ship, asymmetrical and unbalanced in gravity and atmosphere, was already being battered as it fought its way down toward Tirol’s surface.
But by some miracle the lumbering vessel held together. Rick Hunter found himself rooting for the Sentinels, whoever they were. He felt emotions he hadn’t felt in years—buried exaltation from his days in his father’s air circus.
“Our analyses of their power systems don’t make any sense,” a female tech officer reported to the bridge. “Some indications are consistent with Protoculture, but other readings are totally incompatible. We’re even picking up systemry that appears to be—well, like something from the steam age, Captain.”
“Thank you, Colonel,” Lisa said, and the woman’s image disappeared from the bridge’s main screen.
She turned to Exedore and Breetai. “Gentlemen—friends—can you tell me what we’ve encountered?”
Breetai drew a breath, expanding his massive chest, then crossed his tree limb arms across it. “It is galling to us, Lisa, and so we were slow to bring it up, but many of the memories of the Zentraedi are false—constructs of the Robotech Masters, implanted when they—”
For once she saw Breetai’s head, as huge and indomitable as a buffalo’s, hang in dejection. Lisa could feel immense grief and loss coming from him. “They deceived us; made a mockery of our loyalty, our valor, our sacrifices …”
Exedore hastened to fill the ensuing silence. “We know less of this local star group than we do of far-distant ones; the Zentraedi were expanding the Masters’ empire—the outer marches, as your ancient Romans might put it. But you must understand, Mrs. Hunter—um, Captain!—that we cannot trust our own memories in matters like these.”
Breetai’s chin had come up again. “Still, we’ll tell you what we know. Praxis, Peryton, Karbarra, and the other planets whose technology you see mingled there—they were all valued parts of the Masters’ empire. Planets of the local star group, easily reached, they were allowed to keep a large measure of their self-determination so long as they subordinated themselves to the Robotech Masters’ ambitions. They survived, in their fashion, in the eye of the storm.”
“So—they would be the last to fall to the Invid,” Lisa said slowly.
Exedore nodded. “The last, except for Tirol. And worlds upon which the Invid Regess and Regent might wish to vent their anger, or as much of it as they can mount, now that both sides have been so reduced in numbers.”
It was true that the Invid were victorious in the long war against the Masters, but in many cases what they ruled was an empire of ash. Planets, even suns, had died. What was left in that region of the galaxy seemed scarcely worth taking.
Rick’s face appeared on the main screen. “Landing party standing by, Cap’n.” He saluted his wife. He showed nothing but an unerring precision, aware that his demeanor and expression would be studied on a thousand other screens throughout the SDF-3. Behind him were the two heavily armed landing craft that would fly down with the expedition’s envoys to greet the Sentinels. Max’s Skulls were forming up to fly escort and cover. The GMU had already churned into position, its titanic cannon trained on the grounded space-battleship.
Lisa returned Rick’s salute. They cut their hands away from their brows smartly, just like the manual said. She wondered if anyone who was witnessing the exchange could tell how happy he was, now that he was once more venturing into danger. She wondered if he knew it himself.
The Sentinels’ ship had chosen a big patch of ground that would serve as its landing pad. VTs and ground units came in to cover; fearsome armored vehicles clanked and wheeled on their tracks. The descent of the landing craft kicked up clouds of sand and dust that settled quickly.
The protocol had been argued a bit, but nobody on the council wanted to be the one to go up and knock on the Sentinels’ door. So it was Lisa and Rick, flanked by Breetai and Exedore and Lang, who approached the ship un-armed. The group walked under Fantoma’s light and the glare of a hundred of the two-legged Tiresian Ambler spotlights, to what appeared to be the main hatch of the Sentinels’ starship.
But when the main hatch of the ship rolled open, there were none of the dramatics Lisa had unconsciously braced herself for. Instead, a robed figure stood there, at the top of a ramp extended like an impudent tongue from the side of the Sentinels’ ship.
Actually, the figure floated there; the hem of its robe billowed gently an inch or two above the ramp.
Lang had been elected to speak for the REF. He coughed a bit in the swirling dust, one foot on the ramp where it met the sand. “If you come in friendship, I offer you my hand, on behalf of all of us, in friendship.”
The being looking down on him was virtually smooth-faced, like some blank mask. “I cannot offer mine,” it said in the same voice they had heard over the commo.
Other figures, larger, loomed up behind it. Still more crowded at the sides, lower and surreptitiously slinky. Out-gassing from the Sentinels’ ship’s atmosphere put a sudden mist in the air of Tirol, and it got even harder to see.
Then Rick heard Lisa’s scream, and he cried out her name. All at once he was grappling hand-to-hand with the devil.
CHAPTER
THREE
I suppose we shouldn’t have been surprised. We had already discovered, back during the Robotech War, that wherever the basic chemical building blocks of life coexisted, they linked preferentially to form the same subunits that defined the essential biogenetic structures found on Earth. In other words, the ordering of the DNA code wasn’t a quirk of nature.
The formation and linking of amino acids and nucleotides was all but inevitable. The messenger RNA codon-anticodon linkages seemed to operate on a coding intrinsic to the molecules themselves. We knew that life throughout the universe would be very similar, and that some force appeared to dictate that it be so.
But that didn’t keep the sight of the Sentinels from knocking most of us right off our pins.
Lisa Hayes, Recollections
The devil who was fending Rick off wasn’t quite the one from Old Testament scare stories. At least he seemed to lack the power of fire and brimstone, and was trying to reason in accented Tiresian rather than condemning Rick to the Lower Depths and Agony Everlasting.
“Release me! Unhand me!”
All Rick could see was a grinning, slightly demonic face from which horns grew. Then Rick felt himself pulled away with such strength that he thought the massive Vince Grant or even Breetai himself had laid hands on him.
To Rick’s astonishment it was Lang, carefully but forcefully preventing a diplomatic catastrophe.
The Protoculture, working through him? the young admiral wondered.
The air was clearing and a riot had been averted. The Humans’ jaws dropped in wonder as the Sentinels presented themselves.
“I am Veidt, of Haydon IV,” the robed one—the one who had refused Lisa’s hand—said. “And as I was about to say, I cannot offer you my hand, for I have none, nor have I arms, as you understand the concept. Yet, I welcome your words of friendship, and reaffirm mine.” Veidt floated down the ramp toward them and inclined his head solemnly.
Lisa, finding no words, returned the gesture.
The envoys from the Sentinels adjourned with those of the REF to a big, round table, set out at the council’s decree, under the jade glow of crescent Fantoma in the long Tiresian night. The area was lit by banks of illuminator grids, and by the odd-looking, two-legged Tiresian searchlights.
Human servitors brought trays of food and drink, and some of the Sentinels showed no reluctance about helping themselves, though others declined, having different nutritive requirements.
Great Breetai, his oversized chair creaking ominously beneath him, noticed figures pressed against viewports and observation domes in the thrown-together battleship. At his suggestion, a wide as
sortment of provisions was placed in the airlocks; the Sentinel envoys were loud in their thanks, and mentioned, almost as a matter unworthy of discussion, that they had been on near-starvation rations.
The beings who looked like male and female bears walking around on broad, elephantine feet—and wearing harnesses that supported cases and pouches and hand weapons of some sort—were Karbarrans.
Veidt and his mate Sarna were from Haydon IV, a revelation that made Cabell and Rem exchange significant glances that Lang and the others didn’t have time to question them about. All of a sudden, Micronized Zentraedi seemed about as Human as most in-laws, Jack Baker reflected, looking on from the sidelines.
The couple who looked like they were made of living crystal were from a world called Spheris. And the big, supremely proud and athletic women in the daring, barbaric gladiatorial outfits, Gnea and Bela, came from the planet Praxis.
Karen Penn, watching from her vantage point on the roof of a commo van, stared in fascination at a foxlike pair, known as “Gerudans.” They had feet whose tripartite structure reminded her of a hat-rack’s base, and their mouths and snouts were hidden by complex breathing apparatus. Gerudans liked to thrash their long, luxuriant tails when they talked, and on-the-spot adaptations had to be done on their chairs to accommodate them.
Cabell and Exedore had helped Lang and a scratch task force from G-2 Intel and G-5 Community Affairs prepare translation programs for interpreter computers, but in general the envoys managed with broken Tiresian. Most of the REF spoke a Zentraedi-modified version of the language, and virtually everyone in the SDF-3 had had some exposure to it, while all the Sentinels spoke it—as Breetai had said, a lingua franca.
One of the first things to become clear was that the Sentinels weren’t an army, or a governmental body—they were fugitives.
“Fugitives from the Invid tyranny,” Veidt said in his whispery, processed-sounding voice. The voice came from no source Lisa could detect; Veidt and Sarna did not have mouths, but they could be heard and they were being recorded.
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