Devil's Hand

by Jack McKinney

  Rem looked back and forth between the screens and the old man’s face, trying to discern Cabell’s meaning. “It’s hopeless, isn’t it?”

  “I’m not saying that, my boy,” the scientist replied, leaning in to study the data flows. “This feline drone is like its two-legged counterparts: computer-driven and incapable of independent action. Its functions, therefore, must be controlled by an external centralized power source of some kind.” He swiveled around in his chair to gaze at his assistant.

  “That is its weakness, the one flaw in the system, and we must take advantage of it.”

  “Cabell-”

  “Is it not easier to attack one target than a thousand? If we can locate that power source and disable it, then all these dreaded machines will be deactivated.”

  Alert lamps flashed in another part of the room and Cabell swung around to them. “The Inorganics are closing on the city. Now we’ll see how they fare against real firepower.”

  “The Bioroids!” Rem said excitedly.

  “They’re our only hope.”

  Rick and Max had shuttled down to the surface simply to ride back up with Lisa, Miriya, Lang, and other members of the mission command team. Both men were aware that the short trip constituted their last visit to Earth for an indeterminate period of time, but neither of them made much of this. Max was still nursing some concerns about leaving Dana behind, but was otherwise fully committed to the mission. Rick, on the other hand, was so preoccupied with the wedding that he had begun to think of the mission as a simpler and more certain voyage. So it was during the return trip that he was paying almost no attention to the discussion taking place in the command shuttle conference chambers.

  “I only hope this plan works,” Jonathan Wolff was saying. “Coming in disguised as a Zentraedi ship…It could backfire on us.”

  “Oh, you’re forgetting your own Earth history, Colonel,” the Zentraedi ambassador told him.

  “The Greeks and their Trojan horse.”

  “I think you’re confusing history and mythology, Lord Exedore. Wouldn’t you agree, Admiral? Admiral?” Wolff repeated.

  Rick surfaced from his own thoughts to find everyone at the table staring at him. “Huh?

  Sorry, I was, um, thinking about something else.”

  Wolff recapped the exchange: justification for the disguise had been something of an issue from the start. Exedore and Lang were of the opinion that Tirol’s defenses would annihilate any ship that registered an alien signature. According to the Zentraedis, the Robotech Masters had been at war for generations with a race called the Invid, and any unannounced entry into the Valivarre system would be tantamount to an act of aggression.

  Wolff, however, along with several other members of the general staff, advanced the view that the Zentraedi themselves might no longer be considered welcome guests. After all, they had not only failed in their mission to reclaim the SDF-1, but had allied themselves with the very “Micronians” their armada had been ordered to destroy.

  Wolff was a persuasive speaker, and while Rick listened he couldn’t help but be impressed by the scope of the man’s learning. Handsome, articulate, an inspired commander and deadly hand-to-hand combatant, the full bird colonel was considered something of a glamour boy; he favored wraparound sunglasses, wore his dark hair slicked back, and his mustache well-trimmed. But the leader of the notorious “Wolff Pack”

  was anything but glamorous in the field. Wolff had made a name for himself and his Hovertank ground unit during the Southland’s Malcontent Uprisings, where he had first come to the attention of Max Sterling. When the Zentraedis who survived those days spoke of Wolff, one couldn’t help but hear the mixture of reverence and dread in their voices; and anyone who had read the declassified documents covering the Control Zone mop-up ops had no trouble understanding why Wolff and Breetai were often mentioned in the same breath.

  “I’m just saying that disguising the ship and loading it down with mecha only serves to undermine the so-called diplomatic thrust of the mission.” Wolff snorted. “No wonder Leonard and the Southern Cross brass tried to make mincemeat out of you down there.”

  “What do they expect us to do?” Max wanted to know. “Go in there flying a white flag? At least we’ve got some bargaining power this way.”

  “Let’s just hope we won’t need to. use any of it,” Rick said at last, straining against his seat harness. “Without the Zentraedi, the Masters could be defenseless for all we know.”

  Exedore shook his head. “Oh, I wouldn’t count on that, Admiral.” Breetai had already briefed everyone on the mecha the Masters had been developing before Zor’s death-Hoverships and Bioroids.

  “Gentlemen, the time is long past for arguments about strategy,” Lang cut in before Rick could speak. “We’ve all supported this plan, and it seems rather late in the day to be changing our mind.”

  “I agree,” Max said.

  “Look, I agree,” Wolff wanted the table to know. “I’d just like us to agree on an approach.

  Are we going in with fists raised or hands up? The Masters aren’t going to be fooled by our outward appearance-not for long, at any rate.”

  “Possibly not,” Exedore answered him. “But if we allow possibilities to influence us, we’ll never leave orbit.”

  “I’ve got as many doubts as anybody,” Rick said from the head of the table. “But the time’s come to put them behind us. We’ve made our bed, as the saying goes…”

  Brave Talk, Hunter, he thought, listening to his own words. And I’ll keep telling myself that when I’m walking down the aisle.

  Two RDF officers were watching the approach of the command shuttle from a rectangular bay in one of the factory satellite’s peripheral pods. One was a slim and eager-eyed young major who had recently been appointed adjutant to General T. R. Edwards; and the other was the general himself, his disfiguration concealed beneath an irregularly-shaped black-alloy plate that covered most of the right side of his face and more than half his skull.

  On the uncovered left side of his head, long blond hair fell in waves to the collar of his tight-fitting uniform. He was high-cheekboned and square jawed, and might have been considered handsome even with the plate, were it not for the cruelty in his eye and downward-turning mouth.

  “So tell me, Benson,” Edwards said, while his one eye continued to track the shuttle’s course, “what do you know about the illustrious vice admiral?”

  “I know that Hunter’s one of our most decorated heroes, sir,” Benson reported to the general’s broad back. “Leader of the Skull during the Robotech War, commander of the RDF after the destruction of the superdimensional for tresses, about to marry the admiral…That’s about it, sir.”

  Edwards clasped his hands behind his back. “That’s right. The high command likes to award medals to people who end up in the right place at the right time.”

  “Sir?” Benson asked.

  “Anything in your academy history books about Roy Fokker?” Edwards said nastily over his shoulder. “Now there was a real VT ace for you. I remember turning those blue skies red trying to nail his ass…But you’re too young to remember the Global War, aren’t you, Benson? The real heroes.” Edwards leaned forward and pressed his fingertips against the bay’s permaplas viewport. “Fokker taught Hunter everything he knew, did you know that?

  You might even say that Hunter is what Fokker would’ve been, Major-that Hunter is Fokker.”

  Benson swallowed hard, unsure how to respond, uncertain if he even should.

  Edwards touched his skullplate, remembering, forcing himself back over tormented terrain-to what was left of Alaska Base after Zentraedi annihilation bolts had destroyed the Grand Cannon and made a hell of that icebound site. And how one man and one woman had survived. The woman was unharmed, protected where she cowered while her father had fried alive; but the man, how he had suffered! What agony he had endured, down on his knees shamelessly trying to push the ruins of an eye back where it belonged, fingers pinched in an
effort to knit together flesh that had been opened on his face and forehead.

  Then the rapture he had known when a solitary Veritech had appeared out of those unnatural clouds. But it was the woman that VT pilot had come for, and no other. It was the woman who had been flown to safety, the woman who had risen through the ranks, while the man had been left behind to die, to rot in that alien-made inferno…

  “Ah, what a wedding this will be, Benson,” Edwards continued after a moment of angry silence. “Admirals Rick Hunter and Lisa Hayes. Star-crossed lovers, if ever there were.

  Born and reborn for each other.”

  “Till death do them part,” Benson returned with a uncomfortable laugh.

  Edwards spun on his heels, face contorted, then erupting in laughter. “Yes, Major, how right you are!”

  Most of the Zentraedi had been off scouring the galaxy for Zor’s ship and its hidden Protoculture matrix when the Robotech Masters first perfected the Bioroids. Sixty-foot-tall nontransformable goliath knights piloted by low-level clones, they were meant to act as the Masters’ police force on the remote worlds that comprised Tirol’s empire, freeing the Zentraedi for further acts of conquest and continued warfare against the Invid. The Masters had never considered that Protoculture would one day be in limited supply, nor that their army of giant warriors would be defeated in a distant corner of the Fourth Quadrant by so simple a weapon as love. So it fell on the Bioroids by chance and Protoculture’s own dark designs, to defend the Masters’ empire against Optera’s ravenous horde. But try as they might, they were no match for the Invid Shock Troopers and Pincer Ships, with their plasma weapons and energy discs. And as Protoculture grew more and more scarce, they could barely defend against the mindless Inorganics.

  “It is sheer numbers,” Cabell explained to Rem as they watched Tiresia’s first line of defense fall. The clonemasters left behind to rule the Bioroid pilots were an inferior lot, so the fight was not all it should have been. The Masters have thrown them our world, Cabell left unsaid. Those massive spade fortresses with their clone populations were the Masters’ new homes; they had no plans to return to Tirol.

  Command-detonated mines took out wave after wave of Hellcats, but this did little more than delay the inevitable. The Bioroids dug in, finding cover behind hastily-erected barricades, and fired until their cannons and assault riffles went red-hot and depleted. And when the Inorganics began to overrun their lines, they went hand-to-claw with the marauders, employing last-stand tactics worthy of history’s finest. Cabell could feel no sympathy for them as such; but staring at the lab’s central viewscreen he was overcome by a greater sense of pathos and loss. External mikes picked up the clones’ anguished cries, their desperate utterances to one another in that raspy, almost synthesized voice the Masters so loved.

  “There’s too many of them!” the pilot of a blue Bioroid told his teammates along the front, before two Hellcats leaped and crashed through the mecha’s visorlike faceshield. A second blue blasted the intruders with the last of his weapon’s charge, only to fall an instant later, Inorganics ripping at the machine’s armor in a mad effort to get to the pilot within.

  Disgusted, Cabell stood up and reached across the console to shut down the audio transmissions. “The Flower of Life, that’s what they’ve come for,” he told his apprentice in a tired voice.

  “But that plant hasn’t been present in this sector for generations,” Rem said, slipping into the padded con chair.

  “Then they’ll want the matrix. Or failing that, vengeance for what the Masters ordered done to their world.”

  Rem turned his attention to the screen. Scrim devils and Hellcats were tearing through the Bioroid base, eyes aglow like hot coals, fangs slick with the clone pilots’ blood. “They’ll rip the planet apart looking for something they’ll never find.”

  “No one ever accused the Invid of being logical, my boy, only thorough.”

  “Then the city will fall next. Those drones are unstoppable.”

  “Nonsense,” Cabell exclaimed, anger in his voice. “They may be intimidating, but they’re not unstoppable.”

  Rem shot to his feet. “Then let’s find their weak spot, Cabell.” He drew a handgun from beneath his cape and armed it. “And for that, we’re going to require a specimen.”

  CHAPTER THREE

  Try as he might to offset the suffering his discoveries had unleashed, Zor’s mistakes kept piling up, compounding themselves. He’d sent his ship to Earth only to have the Zentraedi follow it there; he’d hidden the matrix so well that the Masters had ample time to wage their war; his seeded worlds had drawn the Invid…What remained but the final injustice?-that by trying to replicate his very form and drives, the Regent and Regis should become prisoners of appetites they had never before experienced. Is it any mystery why even the Masters banished his image throughout their empire?

  Bloom Nesterfig, The Social Organization of the Invid Brigadier General Reinhardt, having shuttled up to the factory earlier that day, was on hand to meet the mission command team. He informed Lang, Lord Exedore, Lisa, and Rick that things were still running on schedule; the last shiploads of supplies and stores were on their way up from Earth even now, and most of the 10,000 who would make up the crew were already aboard the satellite, many aboard the SDF-3 itself. Max and Miriya joined the others by an enormous hexagonal viewport that overlooked the null-gee central construction hold. They were joined after a moment by Colonel Wolff and Jean Grant, who had Bowie and Dana by the hand.

  The view from here was fore to aft along the underside of the fortress. Lisa often wished that the bow wasn’t quite so, well, phallic-the euphemism she employed in mixed company.

  But the twin booms of the main gun were just that: like two horned, tumescent appendages that took up nearly a third of the crimson ship’s length. If the weapon had none of the awesome firepower of the SDF-1’s main gun, at least it had the look of power to it. Autowelders and supply shuttles were moving through the hold’s captured sunlight, and a crew of full-size Zentraedi were at work on one of the sky-blue sensor blisters along the fortress’s port side.

  “How many kilometers out will we have to be before we can fold?” Wolff wanted to know.

  Everyone remembered all too plainly what had happened when the SDF-1 attempted to fold while still in the vicinity of Macross Island.

  “Lunar orbit will suffice,” Exedore told him. “Doctor Lang and Breetai concur on this.”

  “Speak of the devil,” Lisa said, looking around the hold, “I thought he was supposed to meet us here.”

  Miriya laughed shortly. “He probably forgot.”

  “He’s been pretty busy,” Rick offered.

  “Well, we can’t wait,” Reinhardt said, running a hand over his smooth pate. “We’ve got a lot of last-minute details to attend to and-”

  Everyone reacted to Dana’s gasp at the same moment, turning first to the child’s startled face, then to the hatchway she had her eyes fixed on.

  There was a giant standing here.

  Half the gathered group knew him as a sixty-footer, of course, but even micronized Breetai was an impressive sight: almost eight feet of power dressed in a uniform more befitting a comic book hero than a Zentraedi commander, and wearing a masklike helmet that left only his mouth and lantern jaw exposed.

  Before anyone could speak, he had moved in and onehand heaved Lisa and Miriya atop each of his shoulders. His voice boomed. “So I’m not important enough to wait for, huh?

  You Micronians are an impatient lot.”

  He let the women protest a moment before setting them back down on the floor.

  “I never thought I’d see you like this again,” Lisa said, tugging her uniform back into shape.

  The only other time Breetai had permitted himself to undergo the reduction process was during the search of the SDF-1 for the Protoculture matrix.

  “It takes a man to give away a bride,” Breetai said in all seriousness, “not a giant.”

  Dawn marke
d Tiresia’s doom. The troop carriers returned, yawning catastrophe; but this time it wasn’t Inorganics they set loose, but the crablike Shock Troopers and Pincer Ships.

  They attacked without mercy, skimming discs of white annihilation into the streets, dwellings, and abandoned temples. The humanoid populace huddled together in shelters, while those masterless clones who had become the city’s walking dead surrendered and burned. Left to fend for themselves, the old and infirm tried to hide from the invaders, but it was hardly a day to play games with the Reaper: his minions were everywhere, and within hours the city was laid to waste.

  Cannon muzzles and missile racks sprang from hidden emplacements, spewing return fire into the void, and once again the Bioroids faced the storm and met their end in heroic bursts of orange flame and blinding light. From the depths of the pyramidal Royal Hall rode an elite unit on saucer-shaped Hovercraft outfitted with powerful disc guns and particle-beam weapons systems. They joined the Invid in an airborne dance of devastation, coupling obscenely in the city skies, exchanging thundering volleys of quantum deaths.

  Morning was filled with the corkscrewing trails of angry projectiles and crisscrossed with hyphens and pulses of colored light. Spherical explosions strobed overhead, rivaling the brightness of Fantoma’s own primary, low in the east behind clouds of debris. Mecha fell like a storm of blazing hail, cutting fiery swaths across the cityscape.

  Here a Pincer Ship put down to give chase to an old man its discs had thrown clear from a Hoverchair. Frustrated, the Invid trained its weapons on Tiresia’s architectural wonders and commenced a deadly pirouette. Statues and ornaments slagged in the heat, and five of the antigrav columns that marked the Royal Hall’s sacred perimeter were toppled.

  Ultimately the Invid’s blue command ships moved in, forming an unbreachable line as they marched through the city, their top-mounted cannons ablaze. Inside the shelters the citizens of Tiresia cowered and clung to one another as the footfalls of the giants’ war strides shook Tirol’s ravaged surface, echoing in the superheated subterranean confinement.