Devil's Hand

by Jack McKinney

  Cabell and Rem had chosen a deserted, now devastated sector for their Hellcat hunt.

  With most of Tiresia’s defenses in ruin, the fierce fighting that typified the early hours of the invasion had subsided to distant hollow blasts from the few remaining contested areas.

  A patrol of bipedal Inorganics moved past the alley where the scientist and his assistant waited. Rem raised the muzzle of the assault rifle he had slung over one shoulder, but Cabell waved him back.

  “But it doesn’t sense our presence,” Rem insisted, peering over Cabell’s shoulder. “Now’s our chance.”

  “No,” Cabell said firmly. “I want one of the feline droids.”

  They began to move into the street after the Inorganic had passed. Cabell kept them to the shadows at first, then grew more brazen. Rem understood that the old man was trying to lure one of the creatures out but he had some misgivings about Cabell’s method.

  “I tope we snare one of them and not the other way around,” he said wearily, swinging the rifle in a gentle arc.

  Cabell stopped short in the center of the street as a kind of mechanical growl reached them from somewhere nearby. “I have the distinct impression our progress is being observed.”

  “I was about to say the same thing.”

  “Perhaps our behavior is puzzling to them,” Cabell mused, back in motion now. “They probably expect us to run in terror.”

  “And I forget, why aren’t we?” Rem started to say when another growl sounded. “Guess they’re not puzzled anymore…Show yourself, fiend,” he growled back, arming the rifle.

  “There!” Cabell said all at once.

  The Hellcat was glaring down at them from a low roof not twenty yards up the street, midday light caught in the beast’s shoulder horns, fangs, and razor-sharp tail. Then it pounced.

  “On stun!” Cabell cried, and Rem fired.

  The short burst glanced off the cat’s torso, confusing it momentarily, but not long enough to make a difference. It leaped straight for the two men before Rem could loose a second shot, but he did manage to shove Cabell clear of the Inorganic’s path. The cat turned sharply as it landed; Rem hit it twice more to no avail.

  “Get away from it, boy!” Rem heard Cabell shout. He looked around, amazed that the old man had covered so much ground in so little time-although the Inorganic was certainly incentive enough: it was hot on Cabell’s trail.

  Rem chased the two of them, firing wildly, and rounded a corner in time to see his mentor barrel-ass down a rubble slide and throw himself into the cockpit of an overturned Bioroid transport ship. Fixed on its prey, the Hellcat seemed unaware of Rem, and was busy trying to claw through the ship’s bubble shield. Rem reached down to up the rifle’s charge, only to find the thing depleted. He was busy cursing himself when he spied a fallen Invid command ship nearby, one of its cannontips still aglow with priming charge.

  Cautiously, he approached the ship, the useless weapon raised. The command plastron was partially ajar, a fourfingered hand lodged in the opening. Rem clambered up and over one of the mecha’s arms and gave the hatch a violent tug, forcing the rifle down into the invader’s face as he did so. But the Invid was already dead, its bulbous head and stalklike neck split wide open. Rem ignored the stench and took a quick look at the cockpit’s bewildering gadgetry. The alien’s right hand was hooked around what Rem decided was the trigger mechanism, and from the looks of things the Hellcat was almost perfectly centered in the cannon’s reticle. Rem grunted a kind of desperate curse, slid down into the cockpit-his legs going knee-deep into a viscous green bath of nutrient fluid-and hit the trigger.

  A pulsed beam of crimson light threw the Hellcat clear from the transport and left it on its side thirty feet from the transport, stunned and enveloped by a kind of St. Elmo’s fire.

  Cabell threw open the canopy and glanced back at the crippled command ship with a bewildered expression.

  “Why did you save me?” the old man yelled in Zentraedi, lingua franca of the Masters’

  empire.

  Rem heard the call and was tempted to stay put for a moment, but thought better of it. He showed himself and said, “Hello, Cabell. All safe and sound? You didn’t really think I’d abandon you, did you?”

  The scientist scowled. “You could have killed me, you young-” He bit off his own words and laughed, resignedly. “My boy, you amaze me.”

  Rem jumped to the ground and approached the transport. “Frankly, I amaze myself.” He looked away from the alien ship he had fired, and gestured to the Hellcat. “Now all we’ve got to do is figure out how to get this thing back to the lab.”

  “My lord, we’ve found no trace of the Flower of Life anywhere,” the voice of an Invid lieutenant reported to the Regent.

  “But that’s impossible, you idiot!” the Regent shouted at his monitor. “This is their homeworld. They must be here! Scan the entire planet.”

  The flagship throne room, like the Invid castle and hives on Optera, was an organic chamber, so given over to the urgings of Protoculture that its very bulkheads and sensor devices resembled living systems of neural-tissue circuitry. Visceral greens and purples, they pulsed to rhythms dictated deep within the ship’s animate drives. So, too, the contoured control couch itself, with its graceful curves, the slender arcing neck of its overhead sensor lamp, its proboscislike forward communicator tube. The Regent did not so much sit as reshape his being to the seat’s demands.

  On either side of him sat a Hellcat larger and more polished than any of the standard versions, with collars encrusted with gems handpicked from the spoils of a score of conquered worlds. Elsewhere, in cages, were living samples from those same worlds: sentient prisoners from Karbarra, Spheris, and the rest.

  “We have searched, my lord,” the trooper continued. “The Sensor Nebula registers no presence of the Flowers. None whatsoever.”

  “Fools!” muttered the Regent, canceling the transmission. He could hear his wife’s laughter behind him.

  “Congratulations, husband,” the Regis mocked him from across the room. “Once again you have impressed us all with your supreme stupidity.”

  “I don’t like your tone,” the Regent said, turning to her.

  One might have almost mistaken her for a humanoid life-form; certainly she was more that than the ursoid and vulpine beings that populated the Regent’s personal zoo. But at the same time there was something ethereal and insubstantial about her, an inhumanness that lurked in the depths of her cobalt eyes. Twenty feet tall and slender, she clothed her completely hairless form in a red full-length robe and curious, five-fingered tasseled gloves. Four emerald-green sensor scarabs that might have been facelike adornments decorated the robe’s bracelike collar and neck closure.

  “I told you the Robotech Masters were too clever to hide the matrix in their own back yard.”

  “Silence, woman!” the Regent demanded, rising from the throne.

  But the Regis stood her ground. “If you hadn’t been so desperate to prove yourself a great warrior, we might have sent spies to learn where they’ve taken it.”

  The Regent looked at his wife in disbelief. “Are you forgetting who got us into this predicament in the first place? I’m not the one who fell under the spell of Zor and allowed him to steal our Flower of Life.”

  “Must you keep harping on that!” the Regis screamed, shutting her eyes and waving her fists in the air. “It happened a long time ago. And since then I have evolved, while you’ve remained the spoiled child you always were. You took his life; now you won’t rest content until you’ve conquered his empire.” She gestured offhandedly to the Regent’s “pets” and caged life-forms. “You and your dreams of empire…Mark my words, husband, some day these beings will rise up to strike you down.”

  The Regent laughed. “Yes, you’ve evolved-into a pathetic imitation of the females of Zor’s race.”

  “Perhaps so,” she countered, arms akimbo. “But that’s preferable to imitating the Masters’

  toys a
nd bloodlust.” She turned on her heel and headed for the door. “I’m returning to Optera.”

  “Stop! I forbid you to go!” the Regent told her, furious.

  “Don’t provoke me,” she shouted from the doorway, “you spineless anachronism!”

  “Wait!” the Regent demanded, cursing her. He whirled around as the door hissed closed, Tirol huge in the room’s starboard viewports. “I’ll show, you,” he muttered under his breath.

  “Tirol will feel my potency…and I’ll win back your love.”

  “Toys,” Dr. Harry Penn told Lang, an undisguised note of disapproval in his voice. “War toys, when we could be fashioning wonders.” He was a large man with a gruff-looking exterior that masked the gentlest of spirits. The thick mustache and beard he had grown to mask the pockmarked, hooked-nose cragginess of his face had only ended up adding to the effect he had hoped to minimize. It was a scholarly, academic image he was after, and as the oldest member of the Plenipotentiary Council and one of Lang’s top men he felt he deserved no less.

  “There’ll be time for that when this mission returns,” Lang said evenly. “Until then we have to be sure of our strengths.”

  Penn made a disgruntled sound. “A peaceful mission, a diplomatic mission…Am I the only one who remembers the meaning of those words?”

  The two men were standing by one of the factory’s observation bays; in the blackness of space beyond, two Veritechs were being put through the paces.

  These were not the first generation VTs the Skull and other teams had flown against the Zentraedi, but Alpha fighters, the latest prototypes from Lang’s research department laboratories. The SDF-3’s arsenal wasn’t limited to these reconfigurable one-pilot craft-the last six years had seen the development of Hovertanks, Logans, and an array of new and improved Destroids-but the Veritech remained something of Robotechnology’s favored child, weapon extraordinaire and near-symbol of the war. The Alpha VT had more armor than its older sibling; it packed almost twice the firepower and was equipped with ablative shields and detachable augmentation pods for deepspace flight. Moreover, it had the capability to link up with the so-called Beta VT-a bulkier, thin-winged variant that appeared to lack an appropriate radome-and thereby more than double its range and occupancy capabilities.

  Lang indicated the blue fighter as it twisted through space, reconfiguring to Guardian, then Battloid mode. “I just wanted you to see for yourself the progress we’ve made, Harry.”

  “Sterling, here,” said a voice over the ob deck’s speakers. “The Alpha handled the last sequence beautifully. No sign of stress.”

  “Fine, Max,” said Lang, directing his words to a microphone. “The prototype looks good so far. Now comes the real test,” he added for Penn’s benefit. “Max, Karen, move yourselves into position for trans-docking maneuver.”

  Max rogered the transmission; Karen Penn, Harry’s only daughter, said, “We’re on our way.”

  Lang risked a quarter turn and found Penn regarding him with a mixture of surprise and rage. “You’re awfully quiet, Harry, is something wrong?”

  “Have you gone mad, Lang! You know I didn’t want Karen participating in this test.”

  “What was I supposed to do, Harry, refuse her permission? Don’t forget, she volunteered, and she’s one of our most able young pilots.”

  “But I don’t want her to get mixed up in this, Emil. Can’t you understand that? Science is her future, not warfare.”

  “Control,” Max’s voice squawked over the speakers, “we are in position at T-niner-delta.

  Standing by to reconfigure and align for docking sequence.”

  The maneuver called for each of the Veritechs to jettison and exchange their unmanned Beta modules, blue to red, red to blue. Max carried out his part without a hitch, imaging over to fighter mode and engaging the VT’s retros for a solid linkup with its sister module.

  But Karen slipped up. Max couldn’t tell at first whether she had been too heavyminded, or had simply misread the VT’s telemetry displays. In either case she was in trouble, the blue Beta off on a ride to eternity, and Karen in what looked like a planet-bound freefall.

  Max tried to reach her on the net, through a cacophony of questions and exclamations from command-most of them from Dr. Penn himself. Karen wasn’t responding, but there wasn’t real cause for concern-yet. Assuming she wasn’t unconscious or worse-something unseen, an embolism, perhaps-Karen had ample time to get herself into the Veritech’s EVA suit; and failing that, the factory could bring its tractor beam to bear. But Max wanted to see Karen-pull out of this one without an assist; she was bright and full of potential, and he wanted her for the Skull.

  “Stabilizers are gone,” Karen said suddenly. “…Power surge must have fried the circuitry.”

  Then Dr. Penn’s panicked voice bellowed in Max’s ears. “Sterling, do something! You’ve got to help her!”

  “Karen,” Max said calmly. “Go to Guardian and bring your thrusters into play. I’m right behind you if they fail.”

  “Roger, Skull leader,” Karen returned.

  On the factory ob deck, Penn muscled his way through a crowd of techs to get close to the monitor screen. He sucked in his breath seeing his daughter’s red Alpha in a slowmotion end-over-end fall; but the next instant found the VT reconfigured, its bird-of-prey foot thrusters burning bright in the night. And in another moment she was out of danger and there were hoots and hollers ringing in his ears, tears of release in his eyes.

  Lang and Penn were waiting in the docking bay when the VTs came in. Max missed the days of flattop touchdowns, the cat officers and their impromptu launch dances; but the Daedalus and Prometheus supercarriers were part of the SDF-1 burial mound now, and unnecessary in any case.

  “Karen, thank God you’re all right!” Max heard Dr. Penn call out as the blue’s canopy slid open. “That little escapade nearly gave me a heart attack.”

  Guilt’s his game, Max thought as he climbed out of Skull One.

  “Well, if you were scared, imagine how I felt,” Karen was telling her father. “I’m still shaking.”

  Penn waved a forefinger at her. “This proves once and for all you’ve no business being a test pilot.”

  “Don’t overdo it, Dad.” Karen removed her thinking cap, spilling honey-blond hair to her shoulders. She had small delicate features, eyes the color of pre-Columbian jade. “I’m a professional. This stuff comes with the territory.”

  “I’ll say she is,” Max chimed in before Penn could get in another word. “That linkup wasn’t her fault. Dollars to donuts you’ll find some glitch in the guidance computers.”

  Penn glared at him. “I’m sure you mean well, Commander, but all this is-”

  “Meaning well has nothing to do with it. I just don’t want to see Ensign Penn’s talents go to waste. She impressed me, Dr. Penn-and I’m not easily impressed.”

  Penn blanched some; he wasn’t about to debate Sterling’s words. But Karen was still his daughter. “Well, I’m not impressed,” he told Karen after Max had walked off. “I have others plans for you.”

  She flashed him a look he remembered from way back and started to move off, but Dr.

  Lang put out his hand to stop her.

  “Karen, a moment please.”

  “You gonna chew me out now?”

  “Calm down,” said Lang. “I’m going to recommend you for assignment to a Veritech team.”

  “Just a minute, Emil,” Penn said, one hand clasped around Karen’s upper arm. “Don’t you think you’re overstepping your authority?” He had already lost his wife, and Karen’s joining the RDF had threatened to destroy what had once been a close relationship. Now Lang seemed bent on trying to scuttle what small joy he had left.

  Lang pried his friend’s fingers open and motioned Karen along. “I’m sorry, Harry, but she’s old enough to make up her own mind. You can’t hold on to her forever. Besides, if this mission should encounter resistance, we’re going to need experienced pilots.”

  �
�Resistance,” Penn snorted, and began to storm off. But half-a-dozen steps away he swung around. “All the more reason to hold on to her for as long as I can.”

  CHAPTER FOUR

  Evidence points to the existence of a plethora of mystery cults in the years immediately preceding Tirol’s so-called Great Transition (i.e., that period in which most of the moon’s humanoid population were put to death and the Robotech Masters began their extensive cloning experiments). In fact, some of these cults survived well into the First Period…The labyrinth, apparently, was constructed for ritual use, and the Pyramidal Royal Hall added later as that subterranean cult gave way to one of stellar orientation. Several commentators have felt compelled to bring Minoans, Egyptians, and the Maya into the discussions but aside from certain structural similarities, there was little in common between Tirol and Earth’s religions.

  History of the Second Robotech War Volume CCXVI, “Tirol”

  With the wedding only a day off now, Rick sat in his soon-to-be-vacated quarters aboard the factory satellite contemplating the future. Earth hung in the blackness of the viewport behind the desk. Around him were stacked boxes of personal items he had accumulated over the course of the last four years: photographs, citations-memorabilia dating back to his late father’s air circus, the SDF-1 and New Macross before the storm. He came across a snapshot taken by a robocam unit of Minmei standing by the Macross park’s fountain; poking out from the top of a shopping bag were two posters of the singing star from those early days: one an RDF enlistment ad, and the second a Miss Macross pinup. On the recent side, Lisa was equally, well represented. But the more Rick pored through these things the more depressed he became. He had no doubts bout his love for Lisa, but what would it mean to abandon all this space and free time he had grown accustomed to? Not that there had been much of either, given mission priorities and such, but the idea of personal time, the options. Rick’s hand was actually trembling while he packed. He had begun to wonder whether a drink might help, and was reaching for the bottle he kept around for special occasions, when Vince Grant announced himself at the door and stepped in.