On his butt now, dazed and hurting, Jack directed some choice words against himself.
Muttering, he tried to stand up.
Six pairs of glowing eyes were approaching him out of the crater’s groundsmoke.
“Can you see him?” Karen asked the Beta’s pilot, as she threw herself from the ladder into the mecha’s passenger space.
“Not yet,” the pilot answered her with a hint of anger. “I’ve got a biosensor reading, but there’s just too much smoke down there.”
Karen tried to peer out the canopy. “We’ve got to go back.”
“Suddenly you’re not suicidal.”
“Hey, look,” Karen said, “we just went-”
“Tell it to the judge,” the pilot cut her off. “I’ve got one of them, Skull Leader,” she said over the net. “Number two’s on his own. The cyc’s a memory.”
Karen heard Commander Max Sterling reply, “Reconfigure and go in. But keep it simple.
First sign of big stuff and I want you out of there.”
“Understood, Commander. Reconfiguring…”
Jack slapped his hip holster and gulped. He was weaponless, and the cat drones had effectively cut him off from whatever remained of the Hovercycle.. Not that Jack was even sure he could find it in all the smoke. He turned through a three-sixty looking for some way out, and spotted the partially-ruined archway of an ancient-looking building. He ran for it without hesitation, ignoring the shock waves each ankle sent up his quivering legs.
Presently, he could discern broad steps in front of him, a short flight that led to a pillared platform, and beyond that the arch. Galloping, clanking sounds told him that the Inorganics weren’t far behind.
But there was another sound in the midst of all that eye-smarting smoke: the sound of a Beta’s VTOL flares. Jack realized that the mecha had changed modes and was descending. Trouble was, it was putting down on the wrong side of things. Six drones were standing between him and rescue.
Jack decided to try and wait it out; let the VT handle the drones, then show himself when the coast was clear. He limped his way up the stairs and hastened toward the building.
All at once a Hellcat landed in front of him. Jack dug his heels in and threw himself behind one of the columns as the creature leaped. He felt the closeness of its passage, and began to scramble around the column base, while the Hellcat turned and leaped again. It hit the opposite side of the pillar with a resounding crash, its clawed paws embracing the base and almost tearing into Jack where he stud. Jack jumped for the next column and the next, slaloming his way down the platform one step ahead of the infuriated drone.
He reached the end of the row and tumbled down a flight of steps. The Hellcat was above him snarling and preparing to pounce when he rolled over. Suddenly Jack heard a weapon discharge behind him; at almost the same moment the drone came apart in a shower of fiery particles. He tucked and rolled as heat and a concussive wave battered him.
Then someone’s hand touched his shoulder.
It was an old man with a bald, knob-topped head and two-foot-long snow-white beard.
Jack was certain he was dreaming now.
“Good work, my boy, good work!” the man was congratulating him in Zentraedi.
Jack shook his head to clear it. Behind the man was a youth his own age, a handsome lad with tinted hair and a long cloak. He was cradling an assault rifle.
“Are you the, rebels?” Jack stammered, unsure if he had chosen the correct words.
Cabell stepped back, surprised that the Human knew the old empire’s lingua franca.
“Rebels? No. But we are the ones who sent the message. I am Cabell, and this is Rem.”
Rem nodded and said something in a language Jack had never heard.
Cabell nodded and pulled Jack to his feet. “Your ship,” he said quickly. “We must get to your ship.”
“But-”
“Hurry! There’s no time!”
Cabell and Rem put Jack between them and ran in the direction of the Beta’s landing zone.
Jack wanted to warn them about the drones, but pain was intercepting his words. Besides, the two Tiresians seemed to be aware of the things already.
Angry flashes of orange and white brilliance were piercing the groundsmoke up ahead of them. Jack heard the characteristic chatter of the Beta’s in-close weapons, and follow-up explosions he hoped accounted for the last of the enemy drones. The old man, Cabell, had most of Jack’s weight now; Rem was moving out front through a hail of white-phosphoruslike debris.
Then all at once the firing was over as quickly as it had begun, and Karen’s voice echoed out of an eerie silence.
She called Jack’s name, but he was too weak to respond. Rem and Cabell exchanged a few unintelligible sentences, got Jack between them once again, and hastened toward the call. They were close enough to hear the Veritech’s whistling hum and feel the heat its thrusters were spreading across the bottom of the crater.
The glow of running lights brought out a low moan of relief from Jack. Cabell voiced a Zentraedi greeting; Karen picked up on it after a moment and instructed them to come out with their hands raised.
She was waiting in a combat crouch by one of the VT’s backswept wings when the Tiresians appeared out of the smoke. Jack thought he saw a look of astonishment on her face before Cabell and Rem set him down on the ground. She uttered something he couldn’t catch and directed a question toward the Beta’s open canopy.
Cabell stepped forward and addressed her.
Jack heard her nervous laugh. She had lowered the muzzle of her Wolverine, and was repeating Cabell’s words for the pilot.
“You’ve got to be kidding.”
“No, I swear it,” Karen confirmed. “He said, `Take me to your leader!’”
CHAPTER TWELVE
Cabell impressed all of us as a kind, peace-loving man. And I knew he was one of us when he suggested that we might be able to rendezvous with the Masters in deepspace and give them what they were after (the Protoculture matrix). He’d just finished describing the horrors the Masters had spread through the Fourth Quadrant, and now he was telling us that we still had a chance to make our peace with them. Only a Human could think like that.
The Collected Journals of Admiral Rick Hunter
I don’t give a damn about what your little escapade turned up!” Vince Grant was saying two hours later. “The only thing keeping me from throwing both of you in the brig is Admiral Hunter’s request for leniency on your behalf. And when all the details of this are known, I’m sure he’s going to change his mind as well. Do you read me?”
Karen and Jack swallowed hard and managed to find a collective voice. “Yes, sir; perfectly, sir.”
Grant glared at them. He had his large hands pressed flat against the desk, but straightened up now and advanced to where the two former ensigns were standing at stiff attention. They had returned to the GMU scarcely an hour ago, just enough time for a pit stop at sick bay before being dragged off to Grant’s office. Jack’s right arm was in a sling, his head shaved and bandaged along his forehead. Karen had fared somewhat better, but perhaps because of that the commander was directing most of the flak her way.
“I would have expected as much from him,” Grant continued, gesturing to Jack, “but I’d been led to expect better things from you, Cadet Penn. Much better things! Are you aware of the several other ways your self-appointed rescue mission could have turned out? Are you aware that your rescue endangered lives? Well?”
Karen gulped. “I am, sir. I apologize, sir.”
Grant stared at her in surprise. ” `Apologize,’ Penn-apologize! That is the least of what you’re going to be doing, believe me. Now I want to know which one of you came up with this bright idea.”
“The cadet doesn’t recall, sir,” Karen said, eyes straight ahead.
“Really,” Grant sneered, looking back and forth between Karen and Jack. “A conspiracy, huh?” Arms akimbo, he sidestepped, dark eyes flashing as he regarded Jack from h
is towering height. “And you, Baker…Born-to-be-a-hero, Baker.” Grant motioned behind him.
“I read you were looking for a VT assignment, is that true?”
Jack raised his eyes. “Yes, sir,” he said weakly.
“You’ll be lucky if you end up piloting a fanjet for the sanitation squad, mister!”
Jack blanched. “The cadet would consider it an honor to fly for the s-sanitation squad, Commander, sir.”
“You bet you will, Baker.”
Grant returned to his desk. “Where are the prisoners?” he asked one of his aides.
“In the holding area, sir. The shuttle and Skull Squadron are awaiting the commander’s word.”
Grant ran his eyes over Penn and Baker a final time. It was incredible that they had stumbled on the two Tiresians, that their joyride could possibly have resulted in just the break the RDF needed right now. But breaches of discipline couldn’t be treated lightly, even when the results were more than anyone could have hoped for.
Vince knew Karen’s father, and was aware of the friction between the two of them. Busted now, she would have little recourse but to follow Harry Penn’s lead into research. Max, however, had appealed to Vince to go as lightly as possible; seemed that he and Rick had a special interest in Karen’s fight for independence. And Baker’s cause as well, although Vince couldn’t quite figure it. Baker was too independent already.
“Get the prisoners aboard the shuttle, Captain. And as for these two,” he said, twisting in his chair, “confine them to quarters. I don’t want to see their faces. Understood?” Karen saluted, and Jack did the best he could.
“Sir!”
“Now get them out of here.”
Jack followed Karen out of the office. “How about dinner in, say, six months, if we’re out of this by then?” he asked under his breath.
Karen bit off a laugh. ““Try me in about six years, Baker. Just maybe I’ll be ready to talk to you.”
Jack made a face. This wasn’t supposed to be the way it worked out. But, then again, at least he had some great stories to tell over at the garbage dump.
Rick was hoping to have first crack at the prisoners, but the council wouldn’t hear of it. He had presented his case directly to Lang: the Tiresians were essentially military property; and if indeed they were the same group that had made contact with the GMU, their knowledge of the Invid’s command and control was of vital importance. “We will be certain to address that,” Lang had told him. The Council had even found unexpected support from General Edwards, who still considered the Tiresian message suspect. Rick, however, had succeeded in limiting the interrogation committee to four members of the Plenipotentiary-Dr. Lang, Lord Exedore, Justine Huxley, and Niles Obstat-and four members of the RDF-himself, Lisa, Edwards, and Reinhardt.
The eight, along with security personnel, secretaries, and translators, were assembled in one of the Council’s briefing chambers now, a long, narrow room with a single table and two rectangular viewports that dominated the starboard bulkhead. Tirol would be fully visible for the session, while the SDF-3’s position had reduced Fantoma itself to little more than a slender background crescent. Presently, Cabell and Rem were escorted in and seated at one end of the table opposite Justine Huxley, a UEG Superior Court judge, and Niles Obstat, former senator and head of Monument City’s regional legislature.
Rick heard someone gasp; when he leaned in to look to his left, he saw Lang half out of his chair.
“Is it you?” Lang was asking of the young Tiresian.
Lang’s mind was racing, recalling a day more than twenty years before when he had stood in front of a data screen on the recently arrived SDF-1, and a face with elfin features and almond eyes had greeted Gloval’s recon team. Then a robot with reconfigured wiring had walked into their midst, and while everyone was preoccupied, Lang had tried to activate that mainframe, had inadvertantly taken the mind-boost and altered his very life…
“Is it you?”
The caped Tiresian wore a puzzled look; he turned in his seat, certain that Lang was speaking to someone behind him.
“Zor,” Lang said, more shaken than Rick could ever remember seeing him. “You, you were the one…”
Cabell cleared his throat meaningfully and smiled, one hand on the youth’s shoulder. “No.”
He laughed. “No, there is some resemblance-around the eyes and mouth, perhaps-but this is not Zor. Zor has been dead a long time.”
Lang seemed to come to his senses. “Of course…I knew that.”
Cabell followed Lang’s gaze down the table, where it came to rest on a uncommon-looking man with dwarfish features, cropped red hair, and a thick brow ridge.
The Tiresian’s mouth dropped open.
“Welcome, Cabell,” Exedore said evenly. “No, your eyes have not deceived you, as Dr.
Lang’s have.”
“But, Exedore, how is this possible?” Cabell glanced from face to face, searching for other surprises, then returned to Exedore’s. The first of the Masters’ biogenetically engineered clones! The one whose very history Cabell had been forced to reshape and re-create after the Masters had turned their giant miners to warriors…
Little by little the story unfolded: how the SDF-1-identified by Cabell as Zor’s ship-had crashlanded on Earth, and how some ten years later the Zentraedi had followed. And how a war for the repossession of that ship had commenced.
Cabell was on the edge of his seat, attentive to each added fact, and silent except when he interrupted to provide a date or refine a point.
“And the armada was actually defeated?” he said, as if in shock. “Almost five million ships…” Suddenly a maniacal expression surfaced. “Then, you have the matrix! You do have it, don’t you!”
“It didn’t exist,” Lang answered him. “We searched-”
“No, no, no, no,” Cabell ranted, shaking his head, white beard like a banner. “It does exist!
You searched the fold generators, of course.”
Rick, Lisa, Lang, and Exedore exchanged looks.
“Well, no,” Lang said, almost apologetically. “We didn’t want to tamper with the fold mechanism.”
Cabell slammed his hand on the table. “It’s there! It’s hidden in the fold generators!”
Lang was shaking his head.
“What happened?” Cabell said, disheartened.
Exedore answered him. “The ship was destroyed by Khyron, Cabell. Its remains are buried on Earth.”
Cabell grew strangely silent. He put a hand to his forehead, as though stricken. Rick recognized what he took to be a look of concern and abject terror.
“But…don’t you see,” he began. “No mere collision could destroy that device. It exists-the one source of Protoculture in the Quadrant-and the Masters have left Tirol to find it!”
“Left for where?” Rick demanded.
“Earth, Commander,” Rem answered him.
“Oh my God,” Lisa said.
Edwards and Rick looked at each other. The same names were on both men’s minds, but for different reasons-Zand, Moran, Leonard. The field marshal’s prelaunch warnings about Earth’s vulnerability assumed a sickening immediacy. Rick suppressed a panicked scream that had seemed to lodge itself somewhere beneath his diaphragm.
“But you can overtake them,” Cabell was saying. “The Masters’ fortresses have superluminal drives, but there wasn’t sufficient Protoculture reserves to permit a fold. They have been gone for ten years in your reckoning. You could meet them and arrange an exchange for the device. Surely they do not want war with your world-not when there are so many worlds available to them.” Cabell let his words trail off when he realized that no one was listening to him. It was at this moment that he decided to say nothing of the Elders who had left Tirolspace only a short while ago. Let them be marooned in that cruel void, he said to himself.
Brigadier General Reinhardt grunted sardonically. “This mission was undertaken to avoid just such a war. We came to tell the Masters that Earth didn’t
have what they were looking for.”
“Unfortunately, we knew nothing of the situation here,” Lang added. “The Invid’s attack against us damaged our fold mechanism. We reasoned that by allying ourselves with Tirol…”
“You would have what you needed to return to your world.”
“Precisely.”
Cabell stared at his hands and said nothing.
“What about the message you sent our troops?” Rick cut in, anxious to return the interrogation to its central issue. “What’s the situation down there?”
Briefly, Cabell explained the circumstances of the Invid’s recent conquest of Tirol. He described and named the battle mecha the RDF had found itself up against: the Shock Troopers, Pincer Ships, Command ships, and the Inorganic drones-the Scrim, Crann, Odeon, and Hellcats.
“Their troops are known as Enforcers,” he told the committee. “Essentially they have no independent will, save for certain evolved ones, who are thought of as `scientists.’ But the brain controls all of them.”
“Brain?” said Edwards. “What is this idiocy?”
Cabell stroked his beard. “It is a computer of sorts-but much different than anything either of our races would fashion. We believe it is linked to a larger unit the Invid keep on Optera.
But if you can get to the one they’ve placed in the Royal Hall, you will defeat them here.”
“They’ve deployed some kind of force field,” Rick said as all eyes turned to him. “So far we haven’t been able to penetrate it.”
“What about a surgical strike, Admiral?” Niles Obstat suggested.
Cabell stood up. “Please, Earthers, I know I have no right to ask, but our people are being held prisoner…”
Rick made a calming gesture to reassure the old man. “We’re not going to do anything rash. But we do need a way in, Cabell.”
“You can go in the way we came out,” Rem said suddenly. “Cabell will map it out for you.”
Cabell flashed his assistant an angry look. He had hoped to keep Zor’s laboratory secret a while longer, but he supposed there was no hope of that now. “Of course I will,” he told Rick.
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