Death Dance

by Jack McKinney

  The tunnel was deadly hot, evil-smelling even through the masks' filters, and reminded Jack of fiber-optic vids he had seen of the human body's arterial system. It terminated in a rotunda, whose enormity and crepuscular illumination Jack found disorienting. Dozens of corridors emptied into the area, like detonator horns on an old-fashioned naval mine.

  "We can dispense with these contraptions," Tesla was saying, pulling the transpirator from his snout. He took a deep breath and smiled at everyone. Jack could see that he was taking obvious delight in their amazement.

  "This is our foyer," Tesla said, with an elaborate wave of his arm.

  Jack checked the display on the biosensor Jean had strapped on his wrist. Satisfied, he

  slipped the filtration mask from his mouth, determined to keep a straight face. Still wary, he sniffed at the air, found it slightly dank but breathable, and gave the all-clear for the others to follow his example. "Which way?" he demanded, leading with his chin.

  Tesla pointed to the circular shaft directly overhead. "There." With a theatrical gesture, he motioned the team to gather round him. No sooner had they done so than they found themselves imprisoned by some sort of tractor beam that was lifting them en masse toward the overhead shaft. Gnea brought the tip of her lance to the ribbed underside of Tesla's neck.

  "No," he told her, up on tiptoes to ease the contact. "You have it all wrong. This is simply our...elevator system."

  Jack and Janice were down in a combat crouch, weapons drawn, searching the beam's translucent circumference for any sign of danger. Lron, Crysta, Bela, and Kami were similarly postured, Karbarran air rifles at high port, crossbows armed. Tesla continued to protest for the duration of the thirty-second ascent into the dome's upper reaches.

  Slowly, the tractor field began to de-rezz.

  Jack had relaxed some by the time the beam shut down; then all at once he saw four Invid sentries swinging around to face them, forearm cannons raised.

  Max had seen Miriya's Alpha go down. He had his own VT in Battloid mode now, and was running it toward the crash site through a section of burning forest. Two of his team were dead; at least that many of Miriya's had died as well. He wasn't sure how Wolff was doing, but he had seen more than one Hovertank overturned by Shock Trooper anni disks. Max didn't even want to think about the Garudan slaves. And suddenly there was Miriya to worry about.

  The mecha's scanners caught sight of something up ahead, and Max called for increased intensity, studying the biosensor data displays. A minute later he had visuals. It was Miriya's Red Alpha alright, in lopsided Guardian configuration, radome tipped to the ground-a wounded bird.

  Then Max spotted the Hellcats-four of them, attacking the VT's canopy with a frenzy, battering it with downward blows of their armored heads. He could see that one Inorganic had managed to get a claw inside, and was waving it around, presumably hoping to slice Miriya to shreds. The four turned at the same moment to show Max their gleaming fangs and sword-edged shoulder horns; two hunt-mates leaped for the VT straightaway, but he already had the rifle/cannon locked on them. They came apart in midair like clay pigeons. Max holed a third where it stood glaring at him, and now the final 'Cat snatched its paw from the punctured canopy, reared up, and came at him. Max tried to sidestep the Battloid

  when the Hellcat jumped, but his timing was off; the Inorganic latched on to the mecha's ablative head shields and began to ram its snout against the permaplas visor. Reflexively, Max pressed himself back into the cockpit seat; he had a larger-than-life view of the crazed thing's snapping mouth and false gullet. The 'Cat was snarling, trying desperately to slice open the Battloid's belly with the churning motion of its razor-sharp hind claws. Max shut down the external pickups and armed the head lasers. The angle was almost too oblique, but the Hellcat's back was heaving in and out of the targeting brackets and Max thought he might have a chance. He raised the Battloid's left arm, gripped the 'Cat around the waist, and tugged it into the lasers' field. Then he triggered the in-close guns. The Inorganic brought its head up as the light beams seared into its backside; it took Max's follow-up pulse right through the eyes and dropped to the ground, lifeless.

  Max stomped the thing twice. He imaged over to Guardian mode and pulled his mask tight as he popped the media's canopy. Miriya had yet to show herself. Scampering up along the Red's downswept wing, he peered into the shattered cockpit and began to fumble with the manual-release levers.

  "Miriya!"

  He called her name twice more before he succeeded in springing the ship's protective blister. She appeared unharmed, but unconscious. More troubling, however, was the fact that the Hellcat had ripped off her mask; she had been breathing Garuda's atmosphere for a dangerously long time.

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  Several commentators have felt compelled to point out that Jonathan's Wolff's "slip" [sic: see Mizner's Rakes and Rogues; The True Story of the SDF-3 Expeditionary Mission] was perhaps the pivotal event of the Third Robotech War. The reasoning goes something like this: If Wolff had fired on the Invid ship, Rem would never had reached Haydon IV; and without Rem, the Regis would not have been as likely to instruct her Sensor Nebulae to search the Galaxy's outermost arms for evidence of the matrix, and would not, therefore, have found Earth until years after the Expeditionary mission returned. The reader must decide for him or herself whether anything is to be gained by such speculation; but I would point out that [Mizner's] reasoning can be made to apply in both directions. It is as easy to blame Lynn-Minmei as it is Jonathan Wolff.

  Footnote in Zens Bellow's The Road to Reflex Point

  An Invid ship, a small shuttle, had docked at Haydon IV's spaceport facility. The Regis had been told that it was from Garuda-and bearing gifts.

  She was in her temporary headquarters high atop one of the city's ultratech architectural wonders when news of the ship's arrival was delivered to her. Out of reach, she liked to

  think; distanced from the cold, unsettling presence of the planet's armless, hovering creatures, the displaced and still discontent Praxian Sisterhood, her own discomforting discoveries...And out of the Regent's reach, his dark schemes and mad plans.

  But if anything, Haydon IV had only compounded the misery she had carried here from Optera and Praxis. She felt at the mercy of a confused longing she could not define; a need to break free of this horizonless condition.

  She supposed that she should have been grateful that Haydon IV's inhabitants hadn't in any way trifled with her or denied her anything; but neither had they accepted her as the evolved being she fancied herself to be. It was more accurate to say they had tolerated her presence-as if they were all privy to some grand arcane mystery she couldn't even discern, much less unravel. And furthermore she sensed that this had something to do with the world's equally mysterious founder/creator-Haydon. The databanks she had searched for answers to her own evolutionary puzzles gave some glimpse into his life, but hardly enough to form a complete portrait of the being. And she confessed to a certain trepidation at expanding her efforts along these lines. Already the very foundation of her own life's work had been shaken by what she had uncovered in Haydon's transphysical musings, and all at once she felt too unsure of herself and her ambitions to permit much more in the way of contradiction. There were hints, though, that she was not, as she had imagined, in control of things; that the theft of the Flowers, the Invid's quest, even Zor's misdeeds, were but part of a much grander design-one in which she, too, did little more than play out a role. And that role...that role demanded she accept that what she sought was not the Flowers of Life, but the stuff that had been conjured from them by Zor himself-the Protoculture.

  As she saw it-as she wanted to see it-Protoculture was a malicious energy, a malignancy that did nothing but fuel the war machine of the Masters and her deluded ex-husband. To see it as more would be to admit she had been wrong after all, that the Regent's course was the truer one, the predestined one.

  And suddenly he had sent her some
sort of gift.

  She was pacing the floor like a caged beast now, waiting for the unsolicited thing to be brought up to her. Finally, two of her husband's "scientists" were admitted to her quarters; she recognized one of them as a master she had herself evolved for the express purpose of overseeing Flower gathering on Garuda-another of the cursed worlds Zor had for some reason seen fit to cultivate.

  "Your Grace," the scientist directed up to her, bowing. "The Regent regrets that he could not be here in person to bestow his gift."

  The Regis made a scoffing sound. "If he had come in person, I wouldn't be here to receive him. Now, have the thing brought in and take your leave, underling."

  "Of course, Your Worship," the scientist said, bowing once more. "Only it is not so much a 'thing'..."

  "What then?" she asked him, arms akimbo.

  "More in the way of a live presentation-but one that will surely prove most enlightening." The scientist shouted a few quick commands over his shoulder, and two Invid soldiers marched into the room. Sandwiched between them was a small Tiresioid male, narcotized, so it appeared.

  Puzzled, the Regis reduced her stature some to get a better look at him. One of the soldiers tilted the Tiresioid's face up for her inspection.

  It was Zor.

  A tight scream worked its way up from the very depths of her being, and she came close to losing consciousness, falling back from the soldiers and their terrible trophy and crashing against a communicator sphere.

  "A clone, Your Grace, a clone!" the scientist was shouting, aware of the Regis's distress. "We meant you no ill."

  "How dare you!" she bellowed, frightfully enough to send both soldiers and scientists to their knees, and Rem face-first to the floor.

  "We subjected the clone to the Garudan atmosphere and discovered that his dreams spoke of things we were certain you would find-"

  "Silence!" the Regis said, cutting off the scientist's rush of words. "I know what you thought," she added, more composed now. "And I know what the Regent meant by sending me this...clone. On your feet!"

  Hesitantly, the four Invid did as instructed, leaving Rem where he lay. "Your Highness," the master scientist began on a sheepish note, "Haydon IV's devices will permit us to gaze even deeper into the clone's cellular memory. Perhaps some clue regarding the Masters or the missing Protoculture matrix..."

  "Yes," she answered him, looking down at Rem as he groaned and rolled over. It took all her strength to keep from reaching out to touch him. Would he remember her? she wondered. Would the clone's cellular memory reveal what Zor had been thinking when he seduced her, when he returned to Optera for the seedlings, backed by an army of warrior giants? Would that same memory reveal the path the matrix had taken, the course she would follow?..."Conduct your experiments," she told the relieved group. "Show me the

  future of our race!"

  Jonathan Wolff was beyond believing in miracles, but he was hard-pressed for a better word to describe the sight of several hundred Garudans charging onto the scene to rescue their enslaved brethren. They were cresting the hilltop now-armed with everything from war clubs and bolos and grapnel-shaped things to Karbarran air weapons and antimecha rockets-and dropping down on the Invid soldiers who were keeping the slaves hemmed in. A dozen or so Bioroids on Hoverplatforms were providing them with air support, employing their stem-mounted cannons to rain destruction on Hellcats and Cranns alike.

  Countless defenseless Garudans had been killed in the Inorganics' genocidal attack, but that didn't stop the survivors from rallying once they realized that their world had committed itself to an all-or-nothing stand. They rushed the Invid lines, which were already strained to the breaking point, and fell upon the offworlders with a violence only blind fury could release. It took five, ten, often fifteen Garudans to bring down a single armored soldier, but one by one the enemy fell. Some were pummeled to death, others disintegrated by their own weapons, and still others were stripped of their masks and respirator tanks and left to run amok, crazed long before the spores could work their effect-crazed by the naked fear of that end.

  Spurred on by this reversal, the Wolff Pack and Skull Squadron pulled out all the stops. Until this moment, concern for the well-being of Rick and their other captured comrades had to some extent weakened their resolve; and it took the Garudans' desperate charge to make them remember what the fight for liberation was all about. Re-inspired, VT pilots and Hovertankers let loose their own shadow selves, and swept like avenging angels through ruptured sky and forests infernal. Shock Troopers, soldiers, Optera trees, the farms themselves-nothing was to be spared their wrath.

  With total abandon, Wolff urged his mecha deeper and deeper into the madness, destroying, crippling, killing. For one instant he rejoiced at hearing Miriya Sterling's voice over the tac net-she was presently riding tandem in Max's Alpha/Beta fighter-but that was no more than a fleeting reminder of a past life. He considered himself one of the dead now, in no world's hell but his own. And from that hollow center came a murderous intent that knew no bounds. He could only hope that some of the Sentinels would live to see victory that day.

  "Behind you!" Janice shouted.

  But Jack had already seen them and was halfway through his turn, the rocket launcher atop his shoulder. Three Invid soldiers were advancing up the corridor, their forearm cannons booming. Jack triggered his shot and caught one of the XTs dead center. The

  explosion was enough to drop the other two, but only momentarily; they were back on their feet in an instant, resuming their advance while Jack reached for the grenades clipped to his web belt.

  "We've got them!" he heard Lron, or possibly Crysta, growl. The Karbarrans were positioned on either side of the corridor terminus, grenades in their outstretched mitts. "Now!" Lron said, and the two pivoted and released.

  Jack flattened himself against the floor and covered his head; the roar and concussive heat washed over him and he rolled to one side, running through a quick check of everyone's position. Janice was behind him, kneeling over the quivering mass that was Tesla; Gnea and Bela were off to the right, along a section of curved, featureless wall just short of a second corridor terminus. Learna was opposite them, near the tubestand and sphere arrangement Tesla had called a communicator. The four Invid soldiers who had greeted them after the "elevator" ride were sprawled on the floor, dead; two with arrows sunk inches deep into their thick necks. Close by two more were dead or dying, dropped by high-speed projectiles from the Karbarrans' air rifles.

  "Get him up!" Jack yelled, scrambling to his feet and motioning to Tesla. "Gnea, Bela, check that corridor!"

  The Praxian women had crossbows and swords held low as they moved in; Crysta came up behind them with her rifles ready to mete out additional force. Tesla was up now and dusting off his robes.

  "Barbarians," he said, looking around at the dead soldiers.

  "Save it," Jack spat, giving him a nudge in the gut with the launcher.

  Tesla looked down his snout at the Human. For small and primitive beings, he decided, they were possessed of an incredible ferocity at times. And while this in itself was not uncommon, it was completely at variance with the sympathetic, caring traits they were so fond of displaying.

  Tesla, Jack, Janice, and Learna were nearing the communicator sphere when something suddenly charged the air-a resonant, bone-rattling hum that carried a peculiar odor with it.

  "An alert," Tesla announced, fingers on the sphere's activation controls. "Seems you've succeeded in calling attention to yourselves."

  "Anything?" Jack called out to Gnea. She shook her head, then offered him a perplexed shrug.

  "Ahh, there's the reason they're leaving us alone..."

  Jack turned around in time to see an image come to life in the heart of the sphere. It took a moment to make sense of the scene, and Learna was the first to gasp.

  "Looks as though we've a rebellion on our hands," Tesla ventured.

  The sphere showed a virtual army of
Garudans pouring into the basin. Invid soldiers were butchering them from dug-in positions close to the base of the hive. The Optera tree forest was ablaze, giving the crater the look of a devil's cauldron.

  "It's suicide!"

  Janice put her arm around Learna's soft shoulders.

  "Then let's make it count for something," Jack said in a determined voice. He nudged Tesla into motion again, and the Invid began to lead them along one of the corridors. Shortly they were standing before a shimmering portal similar to the one at the hive entrance. Once again, Tesla's hand or voice "unlocked" the portal, and the team found themselves in a kind of control center, filled with "furniture"-strangely contoured chairs and fairly conventional tables and countertops-wardrobe closets, instrumentality columns, communicator spheres of various size and design, and what looked to be Tiresian Robotech devices.