World Killers

by Jack McKinney

  So he said, "Rem has already received the treatments I have permitted your companions

  to undergo, for I am not through with him as yet. Be that as it may, I will grant you a compromise solution: you may visit him in his confinement, provided that you try to get him to see reason."

  The Regent's subject planetary systems, if they were eavesdropping, would no doubt register that in the Regent's favor. He was quite proud of himself. He had turned the bothersome visit of Veidt and Cabell around so that he might profit from it in a number of ways.

  And, with a little luck, he had bought enough time to come up with a way of slaying the Sentinels once and for all.

  Jack Baker shot yet another of the energy serpents, watching it de-rezz into fast-swirling will-o'-the-wisps of light that dissipated and went dark. It occurred to him that those flickering pinpoints of light might be fading only to reconverge and come at him again, but there was no time to wonder about that.

  "Jack! Two o'clock!" gritted Learna, who stood to Jack's right, still finishing off a writhing, crackling mass that was headed straight for her from her right. Twelve o'clock was the leader's position, of course.

  Jack finished blowing away a bunch of the things to his left that were wriggling at him, then traversed his beam and flamed the two-o'clock snakes. He caught sinuous movement to his left again and began hosing down a nearby console with a sustained Protoculture salvo; it was thick with energy serpents, like a medusa.

  Bela, in the Battloid's rear-now lower-seat, whistled and made ear-piercing war cries, when she wasn't spotting new targets for him. She seemed to be enjoying herself.

  The Battloids' security wheel was surrounded by a sea of undulating glow-shapes; more and more seeped forth by the second, from every crevice and feature of the place. The mecha swept their constant-fire aim around and up and back, but the snakes closed in relentlessly. It was as if the technolandscape had come alive.

  The Battloids fought with all the strength, power, and precision that Robotechnology had built into them, but it seemed hopeless. Energy levels were dropping sharply due to the ferocious demands of the weapons systems.

  My first real command. Jack thought bitterly, and my last, too, maybe. Perfect record: no wins.

  Then he thought of the afflicted-Karen and the others-somewhere above, in Glike. And Veidt, Cabell, and the rest of the escorts would be there, too, all of them counting on

  Jack's team to get through.

  But it was Karen's face he saw before him, and it made him fight like a man possessed.

  But even the awesome firepower of five titan Battloids wasn't enough to keep back the tide of Haydon defenders; energy serpents struck at the foot of Jan's mecha, sending out bursts of heat and light, and dissolving metal. She lurched, checked herself when her first impulse was to stomp them (which would only have made it that much easier for them to damage her), and zapped them instead, melting decking and sending gobs of incandescence flying.

  But while Janice was doing that, another dozen snakes got in close enough to coil and strike at Kami, who was to her right. The shields appeared to give no protection whatsoever against the things. In the meantime, several more dropped onto Lron from high overhead and began melting their way through his Battloid.

  Jack made himself face the fact that there was no way out for the Battloids. Snakes were beginning to rain down from the ceiling, and he couldn't see any avenue of retreat for the mecha. It was a command he hated giving as much as a naval officer would hate giving the order to abandon ship, but Jack gritted his teeth and said, "Prepare to eject."

  He got no argument; everyone had seen that their current situation was untenable, and knew that getting clear of the Protoculture-powered mecha was their only chance. While listening to the others run through the eject checklist and doing so himself, Jack hit a control stud as he imaged his ship.

  His Battloid made a bowling movement. Crysta's cockpit/escape capsule went sliding into the clear along the decking. A rough ride, but better than being consumed by Haydon IV's gruesome defenses. The snakes ignored the module, but kept coming at the VTs.

  "You all strapped in tight back there, Bela?"

  "Take us for a ride, Jackie boy!" she roared merrily.

  Jack hurried his checklist rundown, to catch up with the others. The Veritechs had zero-zero-eject systems, so that occupants could survive a punch-out even at ground level, even at a standstill.

  The snakes had gotten through on the decking now, swarming at them, while more rained down from every cranny in the ceiling like some bizarre neon version of an Old Testament plague. "All right, everybody: hit it!" Jack barked. "And once you touch down, keep moving and don't look back!"

  Janice had already punched out, pieces of her Battloid blown free by explosive bolts so

  that her cockpit could be fired clear on blue eruptions of Protoculture power. Kami and Learna went at almost exactly the same moment, lofted through the air along with their passengers.

  Jack hesitated until he saw that Lron was away, and then reached for his eject switch. He hit it, then reached up, crossing his arms during the fuse-delay to grab his seat harness, hands to opposite shoulders.

  He gripped with everything he had and held his elbows tightly to him so that his arms would not flap around and get broken when the charges went off.

  He almost didn't make it; the snakes had gotten through his mecha's shin armor and attacked the systemry there.

  A power flux sent the metal goliath reeling, and for a moment Jack thought he and Bela were going to be fired straight into a metal rampart of Haydonite apparatus. But at the last split second, the Battloid responded to his frantic imaging and straightened. The jolt of the ejection felt like it was going to push his head down into his chest cavity.

  Bela let out a lusty battle cry, mixed with her deep laughter. Jack was not nearly so boisterous.

  Lron and the rest were already scrambling free of their cockpit/escape capsules. Crysta and her Invid passenger came trotting toward the grounded capsules from the spot where her cockpit had stopped after Jack bowled it into the clear.

  Even the Invid captives-Tesla and the two scientists-were stepping lively. Jack was fumbling to hit the releases on his safety harness before his capsule smacked the decking, partially crumpling its skin.

  He heard Jan's voice over his helmet phones. "Get clear of your capsules! Hurry! The snakes have sensed them somehow!"

  Jack blew the canopy and scrambled out to stand on his seat, grasping the windshield frame. Jan was right: most of the snakes were still massing to smother the now-motionless Battloids, but some had turned toward them and were slithering in the direction of the ejection capsules.

  "Bela, come on!" He was popping emergency panels, grabbing out gear and weapons from the drop-lockers.

  But she was already on her feet, gathering up her Praxian weapons and the REF gear she had brought along. "Right behind you, laddy-buck."

  Janice Em had laid down fire with her Wolverine assault rifle, but powerful as it was, it wasn't very effective. The shots seemed to make the snakes take notice of her and move to converge on her. On sudden impulse, she took the weapon and hurled it as far from her as she could. Snakes were on it even as it clattered to the decking, striking at it as if the rifle were a living enemy.

  "Get rid of your Protoculture weapons!" she yelled over the net. "That's how they're sensing us!"

  Jack had gathered up his own gear, but now he threw aside his Wolverine and his Shiva energy handgun as well. All around him, the others were doing the same. As each discarded weapon landed, snakes piled onto it, striking at it with bites that sent up fireworks and scoria.

  The party moved away from the capsules carefully, picking their way among snakes that only seemed interested in getting at the ejection modules. There were detonations from the besieged Battloids as they toppled or erupted from the effect of the snakebites.

  Jack's little command took shelter b
ehind a bank of cognizance relays, ducking away from the final, bright explosions that obliterated the mecha. At Jack's command, those who weren't wearing flight helmets kept their hands over their ears and their mouths wide open, so that they wouldn't be deafened. Wreckage whirled and debris ricocheted off the walls of the machine-cavern.

  Jack was already taking stock of his situation, and there was nothing about it that made him want to do victory rolls. True, they still had conventional firearms and the Praxian, Garudan, and Karbarran weapons. And the handheld inertial trackers would give them a direction of sorts. But there were only the limited emergency rations of food and water in the ejection packs, and no viable hope of raising Vince Grant or the others up on the surface with the flight-helmet communicators.

  Most of the equipment the team had brought along had been destroyed with the VTs. They were more like a bunch of marooned survivors than a raiding party.

  But there was one critical thing in their favor: the snakes were ignoring them. Now that the Battloids were smoking wreckage, the snakes seemed to be dissolving away, perhaps returning to whatever fabrication matrices had given them form. Powerful blasts of fire-fighting gas belched from fixtures all around the remains of the Battloids, extinguishing the fires, and tremendous ventilators created a minor windstorm, drawing away the fumes.

  "Walking is good healthy exercise anyway, so my mom used to tell me," Bela said cheerfully, getting to her feet. She was checking over her crossbow and resettling the two-handed shortsword she carried. Clearly, her skintight REF flightsuit was less comfortable to her than the rather daring fighting costume she usually wore.

  Gnea, looking like a giant, lissome seventeen-year-old, went to join her friend and mentor. Gnea held one of the naginatalike Praxian halberds, a polearm with a curved, glittering head and a wicked spike set at the opposite end. Jack had seen the two use their weapons in combat, and had learned the foolishness of underestimating primitive arms.

  He checked his inertial locator; there was no use going back, and so Glike was their only hope now. But then he noticed Janice, standing to one side, distracted. She looked as if she were listening to some distant siren song to which the rest of them were deaf.

  "It's near," she whispered. "Somewhere close, and it's aware of us." Burak, horned like an auroch, who had ridden with her, looked at her strangely.

  "What is?" Crysta asked. She was pumping up the globlar reservoir of her long Karbarran pneumatic rifle with its hinged forestock lever. "Janice, what is it you perceive?"

  "Haydon IV the artificial world has a mind, an Awareness," Janice said, as if in a dream. "And the seat of that Awareness, its nexus, is not far away."

  She knew it was true, but couldn't understand how the knowledge had been given to her. She turned to them. "We must go to it!"

  "Huh-uh." Jack was shrugging into his packstraps. "They'll be waiting for us up there in Glike, remember? Admiral Hunter, and Karen and the rest? People we're supposed to rescue? I admit things haven't exactly been beer and skittles so far, but we're not gonna let 'em down. We stick to the plan."

  Janice Em found that she couldn't answer. She felt like a double image on a monitor screen, ghostly twins standing side by side. The whirlpool of thoughts and sensory impulses that spun within her had stolen her voice, immobilized her. Vast forces were vying within her.

  She had a sudden sense of Lang-not of the Robotech genius's physical presence, but rather of his voice, his intellect. Intentionally submerged memories had surfaced in this moment of crisis. Changes were triggered in the being the REF and the Sentinels-and even Minmei-knew as Janice Em.

  As she transformed her companions drew away from her.

  CHAPTER SIX

  Anybody who says million-to-one odds are unbeatable never had Breetai standing on their side of the scales at the weigh-in.

  Lisa Hayes Hunter, Recollections

  There was no reality, no orderly flow of time, no ground underfoot or substantial object that she could touch. She was in a void, without form, as she had been for so long.

  Then things began to impinge upon her. It came to her that her name was Karen Penn. Other facts and memories and realizations coalesced.

  She was a member of the Sentinels by way of the Robotech Expeditionary Force. Her mother had died in childbirth, and her father held that against Karen to this day. There was another young officer, Jack Baker, whom she-

  She blocked that thought out. But there were more-the memory of how she had been poisoned by the atmosphere of Garuda, swept up in the hallucinatory expanded mind-state the Garudans called hin, a state for which the human mind had never been intended. Then there were the nightmares, the visions, the visitations of the endless mindstorm of the hin. Some had been horrible, some of terrible beauty, but all had strained her grip on her sanity and the very functions of her autonomic nervous system.

  The flickering spark of her life had been all but out when without warning something seemed to be fanning it, encouraging it to glow and grow brighter. Then there was an almost physical feeling, as if she were being flushed out with snowmelt water from a mountain river-as if she were wired up with electrodes.

  And a chorus of somehow silent voices, singing words she never quite understood, drew her up and up from the verge of death.

  Over the preceding weeks, Karen had dreamed or hallucinated many times. Now she had finally awakened. This time, what she saw made her sob a bit, with relief.

  Lieutenant Commander Miriya Sterling sat at her bedside, holding Karen's hand. Once the battle queen of the Zentraedi's feared Quadrono Battalion, now wife to Max Sterling, leader of the Skull Squadron, Miriya had fought for the Human race and the Sentinels as hard as she had ever fought for the Robotech Masters-or even harder; love had shown her the way.

  Miriya gave Karen a tender smile that seemed out of character with the ferocity of a Quadrono. She smoothed a lock of Karen's hair. "Welcome back."

  Karen tried to speak, not even sure what she would say, but Miriya hushed her. "You'll still be weak for a little while; the rest of us were, too. Just rest."

  Miriya turned and spoke softly over her shoulder. "Dr. Grant? She's awake."

  Another face came into view over Miriya's shoulder, a heart-shaped face with big black eyes and skin the color of dark honey. "Take it slow," Dr. Jean Grant said. "You're gonna be just fine, Karen."

  Karen concluded that she wasn't in a Sentinels' sick bay; that much was apparent from what she could see of her surroundings. The apparatus all around her-what she took to be med equipment-had the look of geometrical sculptures in crystal and precious metals, and abstract shapes of neon and laser light. She recalled seeing the same design technology in the Haydonites' module of the starship Farrago. She reached an understandable conclusion.

  "Haydon IV?" Jean and Miriya both nodded their heads slowly. "Then, we've done it? We've liberated another planet from the Invid?"

  "No, Lieutenant." Lisa Hayes Hunter stepped into Karen's line of sight, Rick following a step behind.

  "Garuda was freed," Lisa went on, "but several of us were stricken by the planet's biosphere. Our only chance was Haydonite science, so Vince and Jean and several others brought us here, under a flag of surrender."

  "Not surrender," Rick rasped. "I never surrendered to the Invid, and neither did you! Besides, they don't rule Haydon IV, at least not officially, so a surrender's null and void."

  Karen was startled to see how hateful his expression was, not just in mentioning the Invid but toward everything that had brought him to this moment. She figured the Hunters had already done battle in private.

  "I'm never surrendering!" he swore.

  Lisa looked like she was about to say something but then thought better of it. To cover the awkward silence, Jean got Karen to sit up. There were assorted Haydonites hovering at a polite distance, and through the windows of the Hall of Healing Karen could see the wonderland of Glike, with its flying carpets and fairy-tale architecture.


  "Vince, Colonel Wolff, and Max are trying to find Sarna and get an update on what's going on," Miriya said. "And Cabell and Veidt have an audience with the Regent."

  Karen Penn tried to phrase her next question carefully. Everything was a blur concerning the disastrous raid on the Invid base on Garuda, but she felt a sudden fear. "Did we suffer-many casualties? On Garuda?"

  That seemed to lessen the tension a little. Jean smiled slightly. "It could've been a lot worse. Jack's just fine, Karen."

  Karen blushed and stammered, "I-I didn't mean-that is-" The last thing she wanted was for anybody to think she had a soft spot for that salivating show-off, Jack Baker!