World Killers

by Jack McKinney

  Robotech Sentinels: World Killers

  Book Sixteen of the Robotech Saga

  Copyright 1988 by Jack McKinney

  CHAPTER ONE

  They were the New Paladins, riding forth to answer the trumpet call to a nightmare war. They were mortals caught up in events that transcended anything they had ever expected. Many of them were career military people who had learned that wars were often won by those who made the fewest screwups.

  But they also knew that everybody screws up sometime. Le Roy la Paz, The Sentinels

  "Everybody stay sharp! Looks like we're gonna have to go to guns!"

  Jack Baker trimmed the mated Veritechs he was flying-the sleek Alpha fighter was now joined like a vaned nose cone to the bigger, burlier Beta ship. A quick glance over his weapons status displays revealed that the other two Alpha-Betas of his raiding party were still in tight formation behind him.

  "Jack, no!" yelled Janice Em. She was in the second ship along with Burak, Lron, and Tesla. "You heard what Veidt and Sarna said: this world's defenses will respond to any hostile action!"

  Actually, Veidt had said the legendary protective systems of the planet responded to the mere intent of intrusion or provocative act. And that certainly seemed to be the case today, even though the fighters had gone in with weapons and shields down.

  "I got a news flash for you: we've already got Haydon IV PO'd at us, kiddo," Jack snorted. "Or d'you think this planet's surface usually twitches and then starts spitting sparklers at people? Get ready; like it or not, it looks as if we're in for some turns 'n' burns."

  One part of him registered the fact that the terrain of Haydon IV wasn't actually twitching; it was changing shape, like something from one of those old-time clay-animation flicks. And the things shooting up at the incoming Veritechs were more like swirling vortices or sheets of flame than sparklers.

  Whatever they were, they were traveling at such high velocity that Jack saw the VTs had no chance of running for it.

  "Activate shields and weapons." Jack tried to sound calm. "And stay close to me." It was too late to go back, so there was nothing to do but drive on.

  Only he wished there were experienced combat fliers in the other two combined VTs. Janice had been through training, and so had Learna, but neither of them had any dogfighting experience to speak of. He would have preferred to have Max and Miriya Sterling flying at his wingtips.

  But Miriya had been stricken, like Rick Hunter and his wife Lisa, by the strange microorganisms of Garuda. And so had another Sentinel, one whose possible death filled Jack with feelings and impulses that bewildered and shocked him...

  He tried to put that out of his mind; what was happening to the famous Baker cool and concentration? Damn!

  From the cockpit's rear seat, where she was strapped into the copilot's station, Bela reached forward to clap him on the shoulder. "That's the lad! Kick their flaming arses! I'll loan you the boot!"

  The vortices of fire came darting and circling, changing shape and roiling-like silken scarves on the wind. All Jack's sensors were in alarm mode, but none of them could tell him what he was facing.

  Fire with fire, he told himself fatalistically, and put a burst of pumped laser into the first one to come into range.

  Somehow Tesla got on the tac net. "No, you fool! You're signing our death warrants!"

  "Don't bother me; I'm workin'," Jack growled.

  The cannonfire seemed to have no effect; the vortice changed course a bit and came straight for him. He shot it again. The other VTs chose targets of opportunity and opened up, too.

  The vortices flared angrily, and some were jarred, but they kept coming. More came from what seemed to be an opening in the countryside below, like flecks of incandescent paint falling upward.

  Jack was still firing when the first vortex hit him. It flared angrily against his shields, sending the indicators toward the danger zones, and it seemed he could feel the infernal heat right through the fuselage. More swarmed after.

  The other VTs were struck, too. The vortices spread across them, coating them in a blinding radiance.

  "Wake up! Come, come; I have no time for this nonsense! Wake him!"

  Rem heard the thick, moist rumbling voice, loud enough to echo and shake the walls. He associated it with the sensation he felt now: bonds still holding his raw, bleeding wrists and ankles, and the cottony blur the Invid psy-scanners had left in his brain.

  At the Regent's command, Invid officers applied brief pain to speed up the effects of the reviving injections they had given him. Rem squirmed and moaned, shaking off part of the fog, and opened his eyes.

  Rem saw the throne room that the Regent had decreed for himself high in a Haydon IV tower. It was a minor mercy to see the light of Briz'dziki, the local sun, rather than the cold insides of the Invid's nearby hive.

  Rem tried to recall what he was doing there, and it came back in a confused, horrifying rush. Capture by the Invid on Garuda; exposure to Garudan atmosphere-why wasn't he dead, or mad?

  Or, perhaps he was-perhaps he was both.

  No, he wasn't dead; the pain of his shackles was a branding-hot clarity too sharp for that.

  But mad...

  As he struggled feebly, he heard a low, mosquitolike humming that quickly built until it shock-waved from one side of his skull to the other. The shackles seemed to grow teeth and gnaw at his wrists, promising to devour their way up his arms and legs, ripping and savaging.

  Rem screamed. The Invid stench coagulated with evil glee in his chest-he was sure he would suffocate.

  Not mad, then-but even more terribly, a victim of hin, the Garudan altered-reality or transcendent state.

  Kami and Learna and their people thrived that way-in hin-as a matter of symbiotic course, interacting with their environment on a microorganic, even subatomic, scale. Stranded from the synergistic biota of their planet, they would not even be sentient beings.

  But to outside life-forms, exposure to the atmosphere of Garuda and to hin was a sentence of death by insanity.

  Rem fought to hold onto some last shred of reality. The seemingly endless memories of the Optera of long ago, and the paradise it had been-but had he only dreamed them? Images of the Regent's estranged mate, the Regis, and her passion for Zor, whose biogenetic material had been made manifest in Rem's cloning-were they fever-dreams of

  the hin? But they had seemed so real, not hallucinatory; more ordered and in focus than any dream or nightmare.

  The Invid officers hoisted Rem to his feet with a clanking of his chains. To Rem's addled and tormented senses, the cold tiles felt like white-green frost that burned the soles of his feet and froze them at the same time.

  The Regent loomed before him, twenty feet high, massive and terrible, his mantle spread like a cobra's hood as he gazed down through liquid black eyes as big as manhole covers. Rem felt the hin seize him again, making the breath in his lungs congeal and refuse to move.

  Rem heard his own whimpering, felt his self-control about to slip from his grasp. He had the abrupt impression that there were things in the shadows waiting to pounce upon him and feast on his marrow, then take his mind and steal his soul. And though a remote part of his intellect could recognize it as the mind-wrenching effect of hin, he couldn't find the strength of will to fight it.

  "Stand him up straight," the Regent said, when Rem would have pulled himself into a weeping fetal ball. "Hold his head up."

  When Rem was standing up and staring, as wild-eyed as an animal with its leg in a trap, the Regent went on. "You're a very difficult fellow, Tiresian. Or should I say, `Clone'? Or better yet, `Zor-clone'?"

  He held up four-fingered fists on wrists several times thicker than Rem's waist. "Whatever you rea
lly are, here's something that might interest you. Your Sentinel friends are coming."

  Rem couldn't hide a wretched whimper of disbelief and despair mixed with crazed hope. The Regent caught it. "That's right: they are coming directly into my hands. To be imprisoned like you, to be put to the Inquisition like you, and to go through all the pain and mind-probing you've gone through."

  Rem was nearly in tears, but the Regent was leaning forward in the colossal throne, drowning him out. "But it needn't happen that way! You can save them, Zor-clone, and save yourself as well! The Haydon IV healers can cure them and cure you, too, this very hour; you can leave with them-if you'll simply say a few paltry words and give me what I want."

  Rem was broken. Courage and conviction and strength and faith-and even love-are overrated when it comes to defense against torture. Yet the Regent failed to incorporate one thing into his equations-the one factor that no agony could overcome: ignorance.

  "Tell me where the last Protoculture matrix is," the Regent hissed. "Tell me where the

  original Zor sent it-hid it! You have many of his memories-how, I'm not sure. But that one must be there, it must!"

  But it wasn't. If it had been, Rem would have yielded it up in a moment. That escape was closed to him, though.

  Rem laid his head to his chest and sobbed. Deep in the hin, he felt the sunlight jeering at him, his fear-sweat turning to acid against his skin, panic closing off his windpipe.

  He heard the creak as the Regent rose from his chair. "Above all things, I despise stubbornness. That, I punish."

  Lynn-Minmei tried to stop the passageway from spinning as she lurched along, her hand held by the mysterious VT pilot; she was barefoot and disheveled, sick with the drinks she had downed but sicker still with her latest and worst glimpse of Human nature.

  Not that she'd meant to drink a lot; she had nothing but contempt for drunkards. But life as the consort of General T. R. Edwards was a little easier to bear after a round or two. And then there was the drink itself-from Edwards's private bottle-something she had heard the top-echelon officers jokingly call weed-whacker.

  It was a 150-proof vacuum distillate that had been soaked in fibers from a plant related to the Flower of Life, and strained out again. Brackish; deadly. But oddly smooth and warming.

  Best taken by the slow shot glass.

  But, she had needed something to fortify her as she sat there and listened to Edwards-the man Minmei had thought she loved, the man to whom she had given herself-reveal himself as a devil incarnate.

  She was dizzy, and thought she might lose her balance, or her lunch-she had had no dinner. "Wait, wait," she puffed, breathless. Her head spun, and she tasted bile in the back of her throat.

  The VT pilot stopped and turned to her, gesturing in a way that made it clear he was concerned about her. Minmei brushed her hair out of her eyes yet again, to study him. "Do I know you? Who are you?"

  He was tall and lean, and demonstrated a supple strength. Behind the tinted facebowl of his flight helmet, all she could discern was the dark, thick beard. He regarded her for a moment, then answered, "It says right here: REF Service # 666-60-937."

  She could see that, and his flight officer's insignia and unit flash. But his name tape, stitched over his left breast pocket, was unfamiliar: Isle, L. His voice, coming through the helmet's tinny external speaker, was unrecognizable.

  Her mystery savior was wearing the unit patch of one of the outfits from Dr. Lang's research facility. Lang had managed to ram through the council an authorization for his own security forces, but Edwards had fought the seconding of pilots to the Robotech scientist. So, this was almost certainly one of the fliers who had been selected from the lower ranks and trained on Tirol to fill the cockpits of Lang's personal army.

  But what was he doing on SDF-3?

  Minmei swayed slowly from side to side, closing one eye in an effort to focus on him. "C'mom, c'mon; I mean, why're y'doing this?" She still wasn't sure he wouldn't drag her back to Edwards-maybe to claim some kind of reward or favor.

  She was also waiting for the alarms to go off.

  Surely, by now, Edwards had realized that she hadn't simply fled his embrace and his bedroom for some fresh air. Even vain, cold Edwards must have admitted to himself by now that Minmei had made a break for freedom.

  "You said you want to go to Tiresia, didn't you?" the VT flier was saying. "And perhaps to Garuda, or Haydon IV? I'll see that you get to wherever you want to go, Minmei. But Tiresia's the obligatory first stop."

  There was some resonance in his voice, even over the speaker, that she thought she recognized. Minmei sighed and ran her hand through her fine black hair again. Plainly, no VT could make a star-jump; and the few remaining REF vessels that could go superluminal were scarcely the kind of spacecraft you could sign out like a borrowed fanjet.

  But there was something in the man's tone, something steely and yet compassionate, that didn't sound like it brooked failure.

  She vaguely remembered saying to him, outside Edwards's quarters, that she wanted to go to Tiresia or Garuda, but the beginning of their adventure was an alcoholic mini-blackout. She was not sure what her plan had been, though, except that Jonathan Wolff and Rick Hunter were out there someplace.

  She shook her head slowly. "I don't-I don't..."

  He took her hand again. "Don't worry, Minmei."

  Then he led her off again. Minmei lost track of things for a while, but Wearily realized at one point that he was shoving oversize deck slippers onto her bare feet. At another point, she felt something sting her arm and saw that he had given her a shot with a medikit ampule.

  "Antinausea," REF # 666-60-937 explained. "It makes it tough to see out the cockpit canopy if you heave your cookies."

  "Cockpit?" she repeated, trying to figure out what he was getting at. Then she realized that he had her standing near a hatch that led to a hangar deck. There were the distant whines of VTs being readied for flight.

  "Wait right here," he said after he led her into the vast, mostly darkened hangar deck. Minmei did not get to ask what he was doing; he was gone.

  The antinausea drug settled her queasiness and brought her around a bit, too. She was drawing deep breaths and burping a bit, sitting on the deck, when he caught her hands and pulled Minmei upward.

  "All set; just follow me. That's our ship over there."

  "Wh-"

  And then they were walking among the parked mecha of the hangar deck. Welding sparks leapt and humming maint-crew machinery made noise in the distance, and she could hear men and women yelling or cursing or cajoling or laughing as they sweated to keep the REF's fighting forces operational.

  He was leading her toward an armored Alpha, a lusterless gray fighter trimmed in olive drab, bulked by its augmentation pods. It was one of the most formidable ships in the REF inventory, and she didn't think it likely that it had been assigned to one of Lang's "six-month-wonder" pilots.

  Minmei saw the boarding ladder before her and it brought back a flood of memories. She was a non-tech person; why did mecha insist on playing such an overwhelming part in her life?

  Then somebody yelled from the distance, and more voices took up the cry. She realized woozily that the voices were coming her way. She had both hands on the boarding ladder and one foot on the first rung when she became aware of a ruckus behind her.

  By the time she turned around, there were three or four flight-deck personnel laid out flat, unconscious. Minmei blinked at them owlishly. What-

  Then REF # 666-60-937 was pushing her up the ladder, loading her into the copilot's seat, and then belting her in. Apparently he knew all the right codes; the launch-cat airlock accepted the powerful Alpha fighter and flung it out into space.

  Green, looming Fantoma cast its light on them and their ship, and Tirol was a gibbous splotch of orange-brown-gray not far from it. The VT pilot turned his craft toward Tirol.

  Suddenly his instruments were squealing and beepin
g for his attention. "Hot scramble from SDF-3, of course," she heard him mutter. "They want you back. They're coming to get you."

  "Then-"

  "Sit tight." He hit the auxiliaries for full military power and dove toward Tirol. Eager pursuers formed up for the hunt.

  Minmei, pressed back in her seat, looking out at the unknowable stars, felt tears pressed from her eyes by acceleration, to wet the headrest behind her.

  "Here they come," said REF # 666-60-937.

  CHAPTER TWO

  In the case of Garudan evolution, there can be no question that a wide spectrum of intracellular organelles developed through the cannibalistic warfare among bacteria that led to an amazing degree of symbiosis. The interactions of the entire Garudan ecosystem, the planet's dominant species included, give weight to those who argue that the evolution of multicellular organisms resulted from the extracellular symbiosis of monocellular organisms.