Dark Powers

by Jack McKinney

  “Haydon IV, Karbarra, Peryton, Geruda, Praxis, Spheris—our homes are worlds under the Invid heel, to one degree or another. The ship in which we arrived was to be our prison, a sort of—zoo? No, what’s the word?—trophy case! Yes, and the hundreds and hundreds of us aboard, its artifacts—all for the pleasure of the Invid Regent.”

  “And what happened?” inquired Justine Huxley, former United Earth Government Superior Court Judge, now a council member. Her tone was neutral, from years of habit. “What changed your circumstances?”

  Lang noted that Burak of Peryton—the devil-horned one—the only Sentinel with neither mate nor companion, had looked fretful throughout the getting-acquainted proceedings. Now he slammed a six-fingered hand—equipped with a second opposable thumb where the edge of a human’s hand would be—on the table and raised a whistling, furious voice.

  “What do the details matter? We overcame our captors, and took the ship! And for every minute we delay here, every minute we wait, sentient beings suffer and die under the Regent’s savagery! Our instruments have shown us your battles; you should recognize by now that the Regent will never offer you peace, or even a truce!

  “Here you sit with your dimensional fortress all but disabled. You don’t dare wait for the Regent to bring the battle to you, do you deny it? Very well! Help us bring it to him! Join us, for our sake and your own survival!”

  The wicked points of Burak’s horns seemed to be vibrating. He glared at them with pupilless, irisless eyes from beneath heavily boned brows. “Help us for the sake of those who are in slavery and anguish, and dying, even at this moment!”

  Something was plainly tearing at Burak’s guts, and Rick was afraid the Perytonian was going to come across the round table at somebody. But Lron, the big male of the two bearish Karbarrans, laid a weighty hand on Burak’s shoulder, and he quieted.

  Nearly Breetai’s height, but far heavier, Lron looked around with what he perhaps meant as an amiable smile. On him, though, it was rather scary, at least as far as Rick was concerned—with those ferocious teeth, so long and white and keen.

  Lron had lowered his heavy goggles, leaving them to hang loosely at his throat. He said in his gruff, moist, somehow mournful growl, “What Burak has said, we’ve all made a solemn pledge to carry out. No matter what the cost, we will fight until we win or the very last one among us is dead. Maybe you, in this REF, don’t understand, but you would, I think, if you spent weeks or months in cages—animals, exhibits for the Invid’s pleasure.”

  Lron’s mate, Crysta, uttered a deep, gurgling snarl, a noise like the draining of some underground lake system. Like her husband/mate, she had horns suggesting diminutive mushrooms sprouting from her forehead.

  Crysta added, “We buried at space many more of us than survived; such was the care the Invid meted out to us. You may ask why we survivors made a pact, to call ourselves the Sentinels—a Zentraedi term, and we hope you comprehend it.

  “Sentinels. The Watchmen. The sentries who say, ‘This place, I protect! Protect with my life! Meddle here, and you start a war only one of us can survive!’ ”

  Crysta was in full roar now. The Humans could smell her fur and muskiness. Lisa was pale, mesmerized, wondering if anything the universe could create was more awesome than an angry she-bear.

  Crysta lapsed into her own language, and computers supplied the translation. “The Regent and his Invid have had their way! And now here is a war only one side can survive!”

  Crysta deliberately drew her paw-hand toward her over the gleaming Tiresian wood of the round table, her nonretractile claws digging in. Corkscrew shavings of wood curled up between her fingers, lacquered on one side, naked and unfinished on the other.

  When the squeal of the tortured wood had died away, Baldan, the living gemstone from the planet Spheris, spoke to fill the silence. “Will you help us? We need supplies, weapons, and allies.”

  “What is your plan?” Justine Huxley asked. She maintained that neutral voice, but Rick could see compassion on her face.

  “First, to liberate Karbarra. There, we can reactivate the weapons mills and arm ourselves completely. Next, open the prison camps of Praxis, where thousands upon thousands of warriors wish only to exact revenge for what has been done to them.”

  “Then we liberate Peryton!” Burak said, pounding his strange fist.

  Baldan ignored him, and Rick saw that the Sentinels weren’t all of a single mind. “Eventually, after Geruda and Spheris are freed, we’ll have certain knowledge we require to free Haydon IV—and then we’ll be ready for the campaign to liberate Peryton. In the course of this war, we will battle the Invid, of course—perhaps we will even defeat them.

  “But if not, our united planets will hunt down the Regent, and force him to surrender or die.”

  While the Plenipotentiary Council withdrew to discuss the Sentinels’ request, Lisa, Rick, and a few others were offered a tour of the peculiar spacecraft.

  Poor Lang seemed torn in two, as his determination to sway the council fought against his passionate desire to examine the ship. As it turned out, though, there was something much more immediate to worry about.

  “Confirmed enemy spacecraft approaching on definite attack vector, I say again, definite attack vector,” a loudspeaker announced. Sirens and warning whoopers were sounding. Humans and Zentraedi looked to the Sentinels suspiciously.

  “It must be the Invid Pursuer,” Burak grated.

  “But we destroyed the Pursuer!” Baldan cried. “Our instruments confirmed it!”

  “Then they were in error,” Burak shot back. “We destroyed a decoy, perhaps.”

  “What’s this all about?” Rick demanded. “What’s a Pursuer?” Lisa was busy on a commo patch, making certain that the SDF-3 was at battle stations.

  Exedor explained, “The Pursuer is a weapon the Invid used in the days when their empire was vast and powerful; I am surprised that there are any left.”

  “Perhaps this is the last,” Lron grunted. “When we rebelled and took the ship, we destroyed its escort vessel, but not before it loosed its Pursuer at us. For two days we dodged and fought the Pursuer, and thought we’d obliterated it, but now it has found us once more.”

  Edwards had come up, his skullpiece throwing back Fantoma’s glow and the glare of the Ambler searchlights. “Well, it’s not going to trouble anybody much longer; not when my Ghost Riders are through with it.”

  “No!” Exedore barked. He turned to Lisa. “Admiral, mere Veritechs haven’t the firepower to deal with a Pursuer. This is a weapon even the Zentraedi feared! Your GMU cannon, even the SDF-3’s primary weapon—none of these have sufficient power to penetrate its shields! It is relentless, and once it finds its target …”

  He gazed up at the Sentinel ship. “It will detonate with enough force to rupture Tirol’s crust.”

  “Yes,” Baldan the glittering Spherian said sadly. “Since its seeking mechanism is locked onto our ship, there is only one answer: we shall lead it away, into deepspace once more, and try to deal with it there.”

  “Is that any way for allies to talk?” Judge Huxley frowned, coming over to them from where the council had abruptly adjourned. She smiled at the surprise on their faces. “The Sentinels and the REF are now officially involved. The vote was five to four.”

  “Madam,” Exedore got out, unable to express himself, knowing hers had been the swing vote. In a wave of emotion, he took her hand, pressing his lips to it, as he had seen Humans do. When he realized what he was doing, Exedore nearly swooned.

  “If the SDF-3’s main gun and the GMU’s and the VT ordnance isn’t enough to zap this Pursuer,” Rick was saying, “what about throwing everything at it at once? We can lead it into the crossfire with the Sentinels’ ship.”

  There was no time to try to come up with a better plan; the Pursuer was only minutes away. Once again, Lisa found herself in overall control; she was on the SDF-3 patch-in right away, ordering the dimensional fortress to leave orbit and swing low for the ambus
h.

  There was no time to process orbital ballistics and computer data; she calculated variables and unknowns and, with a guess and a prayer, set the moment when the trap would be sprung. It was not far off.

  “Somebody’ll have to go along with our new friends,” Edwards said with a sharkish grin. Plainly, he meant to be that one; to make early inroads with these creatures. Privately, he saw it as a possible means toward his own ends.

  But Rick Hunter said, “Forget it, General. You look after the TIC and your Ghost Team.” He turned to Lisa. “Admiral, I’m the logical one to go.”

  He had her there; Rick knew how the SDF-3’s nerve centers operated, how the strikes would be coordinated and carried out, the proper command procedure for orchestrating the whole business from the Sentinels’ end …

  And he looks so happy at the chance to risk his life, Lisa thought. She almost hated him at that moment, but she was a flag-rank officer with more important things to do.

  “Carry on,” she said, her jaw muscles jumping. Rick saluted, turned, and dashed up the ramp along with the Sentinels.

  CHAPTER

  FOUR

  With the death of Zor, the grand Tiresian design to sow the Flower of Life among the stars came to a stop. In fact, in most cases it was reversed. The Flower couldn’t be made to prosper where it didn’t wish to, and couldn’t be coerced. The shrinking, embattled Tiresian empire was forced to divert its resources to its fight for survival.

  The Invid/Robotech Masters conflict that had promised to engulf the galaxy collapsed. The fighting on that side of the Milky Way shrank to the few remaining Haydon’s Worlds, where a handful of Flower-viable spots still remained.

  There was a pattern at work, but none of the combatants had eyes with which to see it.

  Jan Morris, Solar Seeds, Galactic Guardians

  One of the prime selective criteria for REF personnel had been a capacity to function in crisis and under severe stress. As hasty preparations were made to bushwhack the Pursuer, the Ref showed its mettle.

  Not only did arrangements have to be made to have the SDF-3 and the GMU in precisely the right place at precisely the right time, but a makeshift commo/data link to the Sentinels’ ship had to be established. In addition, large numbers of Humans and Zentraedi had to be redeployed, Protoculture weapons fire missions had to be laid on, and VTs had to be hot-scrambled and correctly positioned.

  Lisa, being shuttled to the GMU with the council because there was no time to rejoin her ship, was even too busy to think about how things might never be the same again between her and Rick.

  Entering the Sentinels’ ship, Rick was assailed by strange sights and even stranger smells.

  He had little time to look around as he pounded along behind Lron and Burak and the rest, but from what he could see, the vessel was anything but sophisticated. The air was thick with a solvent smell. Welds and power routing and systemry interfaces, even accounting for the fact that it was alien, all seemed so makeshift.

  Lron had howled orders back at the ramp, and now the ship tremored as its engines came up. Rick fought down a flood of doubt; maybe this wasn’t as good as being in the cockpit of an Alpha, but it sure beat vegetating down in the SDF-3’s Tactical Information Center!

  Still, this alien scow was a strange piece of machinery; there were safety valves venting steam, bundles of cable looping overhead in different directions, mazes of ducting and conduit everywhere he looked, and even—

  He skidded to a stop as Lron and the rest made a sharp right turn at a junction of passageways. Rick found himself staring into what appeared to be a Karbarran version of perdition.

  Or at least something close enough to pass. Rick saw dozens of Karbarrans shoveling tremendous scoops of some kind of fuel into furnaces that seemed to be burning in colors of the spectrum Rick had never seen before. Whatever the fuel was, it was piled high in bunkers nearby; the Karbarrans might have been stokers in a nineteeth-century ironclad, allowing for their thick goggles and long, gleaming teeth.

  Rick stood transfixed, breathing the stench of singed fur.

  Suddenly, Lron’s enormous paw closed around his arm, and he was yanked off toward the bridge. The trip showed him more of the same mismatched machinery. He recalled Lron saying that the Sentinels’ ship had been put together as a sort of aggregate trophy for the Regent, but this was carrying things rather far.

  Then he was shoved into a cramped elevator thick with the odor of machine lubricants and metal filings. Whatever the occupancy limit was, the group exceeded it, and Rick found himself pressed up against Bela, the taller—six foot eight or so, he estimated—and brawnier of the two amazons from Praxis.

  Her body showed the definition of a bodybuilder’s; the pleasant scent of some kind of skin oil or balm emanated from her. While most of her definitely looked Human, Bela’s eyes resembled those of an eagle.

  He was acutely aware that her skimpy ceremonial fighting costume left a lot of skin exposed, and that a good deal of it, along with metallic bosses and leather-set gems, was pressed up against his uniform. To the primary mission of dealing with the Pursuer a most important secondary one was added: making sure Lisa never found out about the elevator ride.

  Bela smiled at him, showing white, even teeth and deep-dish dimples. “Welcome aboard the—” Here she used a word that his translator chip rendered as Farrago.

  “Thanks for throwing in with us, Admiral,” Bela added. “You’re as brave as any woman I ever met.”

  “Um. Thanks …” was all Rick managed to say before the lift door spiraled open and the group charged out onto the bridge. The bridge was a blister of transparent material, a few hundred feet through its long axis, fifty across, set high up and forward on the bizarre megastructure of the Farrago.

  In the few seconds he had to look around, Rick noticed the same design contrasts he had seen on the rest of the ship. Then he spotted the command station of the Farrago.

  “Why am I not surprised?” Rick asked himself aloud, walking toward it slowly, almost unwillingly.

  “Gorgeous, isn’t it?” Lron grunted heartily. “It’s Karbarran, of course.”

  Of course. Who else but the hulking bears could spin a wooden ship’s wheel ten feet in diameter? The wheel was made of polished purple wood, set with fittings of white brass. It looked like a giant carved spider with extra legs that had suffered rigor mortis and had an enormous hoop affixed to all its ankles.

  “Sentinels’ flagship, do you copy?” Lisa’s voice was saying over the commo. The Praxians and Karbarrans and Gerudans and others who had been manning the communications consoles made way for Rick as he walked over, in a daze, to respond.

  The mike resembled an old-fashioned gramophone horn. A beautifully luminous Spherian woman showed him how to throw the beer-tap lever so that he could transmit. “This is the Farrago, reading you five-by-five, Admiral. When does the party start?”

  That drew a low chuckle from Gnea, Bela’s younger sidekick—who looked like a giant sixteen-year-old—and an amused rumble from Lron. Lisa answered, “We’re ready when you are. Lift off, meet the Pursuer at altitude one hundred thousand or so, and bring him back here in a pass from magnetic east to west, altitude three thousand feet, is that clear? We’ve accessed old Zentraedi battle tapes; maintain a distance of at least ten thousand feet from your attacker at all times! Do you roger, Farrago?”

  Rick repeated the instructions word for word, then it seemed like there was nothing to say. The Sentinel ship rumbled and quaked, then it was airborne, blasting away into the sky, and still he couldn’t decide what it was he wanted to say to his wife. “We still owe each other that waltz, Lisa,” he finally blurted.

  There was a silent hesitation at the other end of the link, then the brief throb of her laughter. “You rat! Watch your tail.”

  * * *

  The Pursuer was the last of its kind.

  Deployed now for a kill in atmosphere, it resembled an umbrella blown inside out by the wind, its fabric stripped
away. It plunged toward its prey only to find that its prey was rising to meet it.

  It hadn’t been an easy hunt; the Pursuer had been created to home in on the Protoculture systemry of an enemy and eliminate the target, but the bizarre ship it had been stalking fit no known profile. Sometimes Farrago was a target; sometimes it simply wasn’t.

  And so the silent duel had been waged across the light-years, the Pursuer stymied again and again, frustrated by the lifethings in the ship it hunted. But now the kill was near; soon the Pursuer would know the detonation/orgasm/death for which its guiding AI sentience longed.

  But now its prey seemed to be coming directly toward it, and that felt wrong. But then the Sentinels’ ship did a shuddering wing-over, and plunged back toward the low-hanging pall of Tirol’s atmosphere. The Pursuer plunged after, ardently.

  “They track Protoculture, y’see,” Lron was bellowing above the noise of reentry, holding Rick down with one hand and spinning the cyclopean wheel with the other—and a little help from Crysta. “That’s how we could keep the Pursuer at bay for so long: we don’t run on Protoculture!”

  The atmosphere was giving Farrago a radical case of the shakes; crewbeings smaller than the Karbarrans were being jostled around just like Rick. The bridge was bedlam. “W-what do you run on?” Rick managed to ask.

  The word Lron snarled in his guttural basso wasn’t one Rick had heard in Zentraedi before, and he managed to query the thin, chip-size translating package clipped to his dress uniform lapel.

  “Peat!” it rendered. Rick tapped the transmitter a few times to make sure it was not malfunctioning. He was about to ask for another translation when the bridge screens were filled with the horror of the Pursuer plunging down at them. The Farrago turned over and dove back toward Tirol’s surface.

  Rick was feeding course information through to the TIC, and trying not to calculate his own chances. The Sentinels’ ship had risen high into the light of Valivarre and Fantoma, but it was falling back quickly. One good thing Rick noted was that the Sentinels’ vessel, like the SDF-3, had artificial gravity, and so he wasn’t likely to get sick before the Pursuer vaporized him.