Devil's Hand

by Jack McKinney

  Bowie had Jean’s petiteness and dark honey complexion; his health had never been robust, but that didn’t prevent blond and lanky Dana from teasing him whenever she could.

  He was standing sullen-faced in the shop’s doorway when she snuck up behind him to yank his SDF cap down over his face.

  “Hey, cut it out!” Bowie yelled. “Why’d you do that, Dana?”

  She returned a wide-eyed look of innocence, elaborate concern in her voice. “I didn’t do anything. I think your brain must be getting smaller.”

  “Ahhh, whose brain’s getting smaller?” Bowie said, working the visored cap up to where it belonged.

  “Okay, I admit it, I’m guilty,” Dana answered him, sincere all of a sudden. “I guess I can’t pull the wool over your eyes.”

  Jean and Miriya had both turned at the sound of Bowie’s initial howl, but they had long ago decided on a policy of nonintervention when it came to the kids. Though children were included in the Expeditionary mission, Bowie and Dana would not be among them. In Bowie’s case it was a matter of health-a fact that had since steered Jean into research medicine. But Dana was exempt for reasons less clear-cut; as the only child of a Human-Zentraedi union, she had been studied, tested, and evaluated since birth, and was judged too precious a commodity to risk on such an enterprise. This, in any case, was the thinking of Professor Zand, who had headed up the medical teams, and Max and Miriya had reluctantly accepted the logic of it. The decision was unalterable now, no matter what, and it was guaranteed that Bowie and Dana would grow up as near siblings under the care of the Sterlings’ close friends, Rolf and Laura Emerson.

  Miriya was thinking these things through while she watched the children’s bickering escalate, then dissolve into playful banter. “Look at them, Jean,” she said the way only a mother can. “Do you think we’re doing the right thing?”

  Jean gave one of the clothes racks a casual spin. “Of course we are, sweetie. You know that.”

  The two women showed strained smiles to one another. How often they had talked about the irony of their friendship; how often they had remembered Jean’s sister-in-law, Claudia Grant, who died in Khyron’s suicide run against the SDF-1. And perhaps the conversation would have taken a turn in this direction even then, had not Lisa chosen just that moment to present herself as bride-to-be.

  “Well, what do you think?” she asked them, turning around for their inspection.

  Miriya, who had worn her hair emerald green for years, was too surprised by the gown’s conservative cut to say much; but Jean said, “I think you picked a beauty, Admiral. That gown is shipshape from stem to stern.”

  “Yeah, but how will it travel in hyperspace?” Miriya thought to ask.

  “You two…” Lisa laughed, while her friends began to finger the gown here and there. None of them were aware that a newcomer had entered the ship until a female voice said, “Excuse me.”

  Lisa looked up and uttered a surprised gasp. Lynn-Minmei was standing in the doorway.

  Lisa had been thinking of her not five minutes before, standing in front of the mirror seeing new age lines in her thirty-five-year-old face and comparing herself to the seemingly ageless star of song and screen.

  “I-I hope I’m not interrupting, Lisa, but I heard you were in town, and well, I just wanted to congratulate you before the wedding. I mean, it’s going to be such a madhouse up there.”

  They had hardly been strangers these past six years, but hadn’t seen each other since the wedding date had been officially announced some five months ago. “I’d love to help out any way I can-that is, if you’d allow me to, Lisa.”

  “Minmei,” Lisa said with a note of disbelief. “This is so unexpected. But don’t be silly, of course you can help,” she added, laughing. “Come here.”

  They embraced, and held hands as they stepped back to regard one another. Lisa couldn’t help but marvel at Minmei’s youth and radiance. She really was the one constant in everyone’s lives.

  “Oh, Lisa, I want so much to let bygones be bygones. That dress is lovely-I always knew you’d make a beautiful bride.”

  “Ms. Minmei’s right, Admiral,” enthused the shop owner, who had appeared out of nowhere. It was obvious that the man was thrilled to have a celebrity of Minmei’s stature in his boutique; he risked a glance at the street, hoping some passersby had noticed her enter.

  “I still think she should get married in her EVA suit,” Bowie said from across the room, only to have Dana pull the cap down on his forehead again.

  “Children!” Jean scolded as the bickering recommenced.

  Minmei asked to see the engagement ring, and Lisa held out her hand.

  “I can’t tell you what it means to see you again, Minmei,” Lisa said softly.

  “That devious little Zentraedi’s got the whole Supreme Council eating out of his hand!”

  Commander Leonard complained to Rolf Emerson after the press conference.

  Emerson, soon to inherit two eight-year-olds, was every bit the commander’s opposite, in appearance as well as ideology; but the two of them had nevertheless managed to maintain a working relationship. Major Emerson, handsome, clean-cut, and fine-featured, was, strictly speaking, RDF; but he had become something of a liaison officer between the general staffs of the military factions. Well aware of Leonard’s xenophobia-and of the infamous “thigh wound” the field marshal had sustained during the Malcontent Uprisings-Emerson was willing to let the racial slur slide, even though he numbered several Zentraedi among his closest and dearest friends.

  “It’s unbelievable,” Leonard was railing, the huge brass buckle of his uniform dazzling even in the dim light of Emerson’s headquarters office. “A diplomatic mission…If it’s a diplomatic mission, then why are they arming that ship with every Robotech weapons system we’ve ever developed?”

  “It’s called `gunboat diplomacy,’ Commander,” Emerson replied, willing to concede the point. Lord Exedore and Breetai claimed that they had no real knowledge of what the Robotech Masters might possess in the way of a war machine now that their race of warrior giants had all but been erased from the galaxy.

  “Well, stupidity’s what I call it. It jeopardizes the very survival of this planet.” Leonard paced in front of Emerson’s desk. “Something stinks here, Major, and it’s not in the ventilation system.”

  CHAPTER TWO

  In the midst of all the ironies and reversals, the struggles, treachery, conquests, and betrayals, the mad scramble for mutated Flowers and irradiated worlds, it was easy to lose sight of the war’s central concern-which was not, as many have claimed, the Flowers of Life, but their deified stepchild, Protoculture. Even the Regis seemed to forget for a time; but it could hardly be said that the Regent’s Invid, the Masters, or the Expeditionary mission, had anything other than Protoculture as their goal and grail. Protoculture was needed to fuel their mecha, to drive their war machines to greater and greater heights.

  And it was all but disappeared from the galaxy. What a trick it played on all of us!

  Sehg Kahler, The Tirolian Campaign

  As it would happen, Commander Leonard’s fears were justified, but eleven years would pass before the spade fortresses of the Robotech Masters appeared in Earthspace. And perhaps history would have vindicated Leonard if the man’s misdeeds had not stayed one step ahead of his contributions. Fate offered him one consolation, though: he would be dead two years before the Invid arrival. Earth would fall, just as he had predicted; just as Tirol fell after the Masters had begun their long journey through space and left their homeworld defenseless.

  The Invid, however, were less confident in those days. Optera-their native planet-and Tirol had been at war for generations, and the Invid especially were at a disadvantage in terms of firepower. They had, after all, been deprived of the one thing that had cemented the social structure of their race-the Flower of Life; and more importantly, they were novices in this game called warfare. On the other hand, the Masters were adepts, addicted to Protocult
ure, obsessed with control, and driven to transform themselves-not through any measure of spiritual evolution, but through sheer conquest of the material realm.

  Profligate, they lived for excess; cloned a race of warrior giants to police their empire, then, still not content, cloned an entire society they could rule at whim. They took the best specimens with them when they abandoned Tirol; all that remained were the three Elders of their race, several hundred imperfect clones-lost without their clonemasters-and Tirol’s preclone population of humanoids, who were of no use to the ascended Masters.

  Tirol, the third of Fantoma’s twelve moons, was not the Masters’ original homeworld; but they had successfully transplanted themselves on that utterly barren planetoid from one of the outer satellites. Tiresia, the capital, a blend of Tirol’s analogue of Greco-Roman architecture and ultratech design, was the only occupied city; and as such was aware of the Invid’s coming ahead of time.

  Aware…but hardly prepared.

  Early-warning sirens and howlers had the humanoid population scurrying, for shelters beneath the city well in advance of the midnight attack. The clones wandered the streets in a kind of daze, while the Elders who were responsible for their reaction made certain to hide themselves away in specially-designed chambers the Masters had seen fit to construct before their mass exodus. But there were two who remained at their work while the alert sounded through the city: the scientist Cabell, and his young assistant, Rem.

  “Whoever they are,” Cabell was saying, while his fingers rushed a series of commands into one of the lab’s data networks, “they’ve put down near the outpost at Rylac.”

  “Is their identity any doubt, Cabell?” Rem asked from behind the old man’s chair. Video monitors showed a dozen burnt-orange oysterlike troop carriers hovering over a jagged ridgeline of mountains west of the city. The network spit out a data card, which Cabell immediately transferred to an adjacent on-line device.

  “I don’t suppose there is, my boy,” the scientist said without turning around. Several of the ships had put down now, and were disgorging mecha from their forward ramps.

  “Will the city’s defenses save us?”

  Cabell left the question unanswered; instead, he turned his attention to activation switches for the remote cameras positioned at the outpost’s perimeter, his long snow-white beard grazing the control studs while he reached across the console. He was every bit a wizard of a man, portly under his tasseled robes and laurel-collared capes, with a hairless knobbed skull and thick white eyebrows, mustache, and beard. He was indeed old enough to be the young man’s father, although that wasn’t precisely the case. Rem was tall and slender, with an ageless, almost elfin face and a thick shock of slate-blue hair. He wore a tight-fitting uniform with a long cape of royal blue.

  “We’re defenseless,” Rem said a moment later, reacting to Cabell’s silence. “Only the old and the sick remain on Tirol.”

  “Quiet!” the scientist told him. The central viewscreen showed the transports lifting off.

  Energy-flux schematics scrolled across half-a-dozen lesser screens. “Now what could they have in mind?”

  Rem gestured to a secondary video monitor. “Frankly, Cabell, I’m more concerned about these monsters they’ve left behind.” Waves of armored, felinelike creatures could be seen advancing up and out of the drop zone.

  Cabell leaned back from the console to contemplate the images, right hand stroking his beard. “They resemble drones, not monsters.” One of the creatures had stopped in its tracks and seemed to be staring at the camera. Cabell brought the lens to bear on the thing, focusing in on the four-legged creature’s razor-sharp claws, fangs, and shoulder horns.

  “It spotted the remote!” Rem said, as the cat’s eyes began to glow. An instant later a metal-shod claw swiped at the camera; the image de-rezzed, and the screen crackled with static.

  The Invid were a long way from home-if Optera could still be thought of in those terms.

  That their strikes against the Masters’ empire were fueled by revenge was true enough; but the conquest of worlds like Karbarra, Praxis, and Spheris had had a more consequential purpose, for all these planets had been seeded by Zor with the Flowers of Life-the renegade scientist’s final attempt at recompense for the horrors his discoveries had inadvertently unleashed. But the resultant Flowers had proved a sterile crop, mutated at best; and so the search was under way for the one key that could unlock the mysteries of Zor’s science: the Protoculture matrix he himself had hidden aboard the Superdimensional Fortress.

  The legendary device had never been uncovered by Lang’s teams of Robotechnicians, and now that ship lay buried under tons of earth, rock, and Macross debris far from where the Invid were directing their quest. But at the time they had no way of knowing these things.

  The Flowers had been their primary concern-their nutrient grail-but that purpose had undergone a slight perversion since Zor’s death at the hands of Invid troopers. For not only had he transgressed by seducing the Flowers’ secret from the Invid Regis; he had also spread a kind of contagion among that race-a pathology of emulation. And within a generation the Invid had refashioned themselves, and, with a form of self-generated Protoculture, created their own galactic war machine-a fleet of discshaped starships, a strike force of bipedal crablike mecha, and an army of mindless battle drones-the so-called Inorganics. But this was chiefly the work of the Invid Regent, not their Queen, and a schism had resulted-one that would ultimately affect Earth’s fragile hold on its future.

  The Invid fleet was anchored in space above Tirol when word spread through the ranks that the Regent himself had decided to take charge of the invasion. Companies of Inorganics had already been deployed on the moon’s surface to counter ground-force resistance. Now, aboard the fleet flagship, one thousand Invid troops stood at attention in the docking bay, backed by more than two hundred Pincer assault mecha.

  The unarmored individual Invid was primate in shape. Bilaterally symmetrical, they stood anywhere from six to eight feet tall, and walked upright on two powerfully-muscled legs.

  Equally massive were the forearms, shoulders, and three-fingered hands, with their opposable thumbs. The bulbous head and huge neck-often held parallel to the ground-approximated that of a snail, with an eye on either side, and two sensory antennae at the snout. The skin was green, almost reptilian, and there was at this stage no sexual differentiation. The Regent himself was by and large a grander, nearly twenty-foot-high version of the same design, save for his purple hue and the organic cowl that rested upon his back like some sort of manta ray. This hood, which could puff like a cobra’s at times, was ridged front to back with tubercle-like sensors that resembled eyeballs.

  The commander of flagship troops genuflected as the hatchway to the Regent’s ship hissed up, spilling brilliant light against the soldier’s crimson body armor. Helmet snout lowered to the floor, the trooper brought its right hand to its breast in salute.

  “My lord, the Inorganics have met only token resistance on Tirol,” the commander reported, its voice distorted by the helmet filters. “So far there is no sign of the Robotech Masters.”

  The Regent remained on the shuttle’s rampway, his bulk and flowing blue robe filling the hatch.

  “Cowering beneath their beds, no doubt,” the Regent said in a voice so deep it seemed to emanate from the ship itself.

  The commander raised its head some, with a whirring of mechanical adjusters. “Our beloved Regis has expressed some displeasure with your strategy, my lord.” It offered up a cassettelike device in its left hand. “She wanted this to be given to you.”

  “A voice imprint?” the Regent said dubiously. “How thoughtful of my wife.” He snatched the cassette in his hand. “I can hardly wait to hear it.”

  He activated the device as he moved from the docking bay into one of the flagship’s corridors. The commander and a ten-trooper squad marched in formation behind him, their armored footfalls echoing in the massive space.

  “
Do you truly believe that you’ll find what you seek on this wretched planet?” the synthesized female voice began. “If so you are even a greater fool than I ever suspected.

  This idiotic invasion of yours is the most-”

  “I’ve heard about enough of that,” the Regent said, deactivating the voice. “Tell me, where is our beloved Regis?” he asked the commander after a moment.

  “She has returned to her fleet flagship, my lord.” When the Regent had reached his quarters, the commander thought to ask, “Shall I tell her you wish to see her, my lord?”

  “Negative,” the Regent said sternly. “The farther she is, the better I like it. See to it that my pets are brought aboard, and let the invasion proceed without her.”

  The Invid squad snapped to as the door hissed closed.

  The humanoid soldiers at the Rylar, outpost were easily overrun. Given the few weapons at their disposal, they made a valiant stand, but the Inorganics proved too much for them.

  The forward assault wave was comprised solely of Invid feline mecha; but behind these Hellcats marched companies of Scrim and Crann and Odeon-Invid robot analogues, which in some ways resembled skeletal versions of their own Shock Troopers and Pincer Ships, a demonic, bipedal infantry.

  A schematic representation of a Scrim came to life on one of Cabell’s monitor screens, rotating and shifting through a series of perspectives, as intact remotes from the Rylac sector continued to bring the action home to the lab.

  “There is only one species capable of producing such a device,” Cabell commented flatly.

  “The Invid,” said Rem. “It was only a matter of time.”

  “The strategy is typical of them: they won’t descend until their fighting drones have cleared away the resistance. And after they’ve devastated Tirol, they’ll leave these things behind to police us.” Hellcat schematics were taking shape on the monitors. “These machines are puzzling, though. It’s almost as if…”