Just when it seemed they couldn't bear it anymore, the light faded and the sound died away. The air lost every breath of movement. In the stillness that followed, the raiders collected themselves and blinked away the dazzling lights circling before their eyes.
Janice Em stood once more in her Human form, the disconnected interface jack in her hand. "Are you all right?" Bela ventured.
"Yes, quite, thank you." She sounded distant, but then she beamed at them in a very Homo sapiens smile.
"I'm fine, and I found out what we need to know."
"But..." Jack realized his submachine gun's muzzle was pointed her way and quickly lowered it. "What was all that shape-changing about?"
Janice looked up at the web of light. "You might say that Haydon IV has been teaching me a few things about my own capabilities and potential. The Tokyo project teams and even Dr. Lang, I'm afraid, didn't quite realize them all."
She collected herself, turning her attention to matters at hand. "But that's beside the point now. We must be on our way."
She had bent to pick up her own weapons and equipment. "And we must hurry. The others are in danger, up above in Glike, and we have to get to them at once."
"Huh? Hey!" Jack trotted after to catch up, as Jan started for a nearby column of
instrumentality. The others fell in behind, Gnea and Bela in particular making sure the Invid kept up and got into no mischief.
The column was the circumference of a spaceport control tower, stretching from the floor to the ceiling. As Jan approached it, a section of flickering indicators slid aside, revealing a small compartment.
Jan turned on her companions, silencing their objections, demands, and threats. "Listen: I'll answer any question you want, explain everything I can, on the journey. Only, we must start now, and this is the first step on the road to Glike."
Jack blew his breath out, cheeks bulging like a bugler's. "If I survive, I'm never volunteering for anything again. Okay; let's march."
The place wasn't too cramped; they had about as much room as in a half-filled elevator. None of them was particularly surprised when the compartment closed up again and there was a feeling of movement, straight up.
"First question," Jack said tiredly. "D'they have rest rooms on this flight?"
"You should've thought of that before we left." Janice Em grinned back at him.
The medics had injected her with something calculated to speed along her sobering-making her neurotransmitters block the acute depressant effects and raising her P3 waves. But Minmei was still writhing between a pair of Ghost Rider security people as she was dragged before Edwards in his office on the top floor of Base Tirol HQ on Fantoma.
She had tried to bite, scratch, and kick, but the REF people were used to hand-to-hand combat, and even though they were under orders not to retaliate, they had kept her from inflicting any significant damage. Exhausted, she was pushed forcefully into a chair and kept seated.
Her face was smudged with dirt and tears. Through a sort of blur, she saw a figure move and heard Edwards's voice. "Wait outside," he told his troops.
She heard the brittle fury in his voice and became truly afraid for the first time. She had seen his moods before, knew he was capable of anything when he was like this-even of murdering her on the spot.
She wiped her eyes and tried to stop crying. Edwards was standing behind his desk, hands clasped at the small of his back.
"Who was the pilot who helped you escape?"
"Go to hell," she choked.
He walked unhurriedly from behind the desk. "Where did you think you were going?"
"God damn you!"
He moved with stunning speed, grabbing a fistful of her hair and winding it painfully, making her cry out, holding her in her seat with his other hand.
"Do you really think you can ever be free of me, Minmei? I never yield anything that's mine; you should know that by now." His voice was very soft, as if it calmed him to be hurting her.
Minmei resisted ineffectually for a moment, then gave up. "Go ahead! Do what you want! You think being cruel makes you strong? I've known real men, and compared to them you're a pitiful excuse for a Human being and a miserable failure as a lover-"
Her own scream cut her off, as he gave her more pain. He had her wrist in a hold that felt like he was about to break it, and he shook her head back and forth slowly to emphasize each word. "Your Jonathan Wolff's dead by now, like Hunter and the rest. Were you going to join the Zentraedi? They got in my way, too; they're finished."
He knelt, pulling her face around to his. "I told you there are things I know, things I've learned since we got to Tirol, that will give me unlimited power. Unlimited control. You may not love me willingly, but you will love me."
Nothing Minmei had ever heard had terrified her like those words. She could feel his hot breath on her; it sickened her.
"Now, you're going to tell me everything I want to know, and all the rest of it. And in the meantime we'll just keep you nice and calm."
The general reached out with his free hand and buzzed for the guards. All her blathering about awakening the dead-it had to be mad raving, of course, he told himself, but it still bothered him. And yet a search of the area had turned up no sign whatsoever of the pilot who had spirited her off SDF-3, nor could Edwards's agents produce any clues.
The dead might mean a number of things, but Edwards suspected he knew whom she
meant. Preposterous...
He flung her at the guards. "Lock her up, dry her out. I want no one to get word of this. Complete cover-up. Tell the interrogators to keep me updated."
After the guards had dragged her out, Edwards gazed out the window.
He could hardly know that, far across a distant landing-site hardtop, a man in a pilot's suit was staring back through a telebinoc at the silhouette so far away that was a mortal enemy.
Lieutenant Isle lowered the telebinoc. All the elaborate security systems and complex equipment and weaponry between him and Edwards were just an abstract problem in mission planning now; just a layered project requiring the proper application and strength of will.
But the battle itself was joined.
CHAPTER EIGHT
If Sartre's right and the history of every person is the story of failure, then something's outta whack here.
Commander Vincent Grant, quoted in The Sentinels, by Le Roy la Paz
If Glike was enchanting from the landing stages and spires of the city, it was overwhelming from the vantage point of a Haydonite cone-flier.
Vince, mesmerized by the fantasyland view, blinked in surprise to realize that the cone was hovering, with its disk-rim up against a landing stage, over the summit of a skyscraper that suggested an inverted icicle. The transparent dome under which he, Jonathan Wolff, and Max had been standing now parted, providing a debarkation gate.
But the landing stage was empty. Max turned to their Haydonite pilot suspiciously. "You said you were taking us to Sarna."
The Haydonite was smaller and more slender than either Veidt or Sarna and had an emerald cast to her skin. In the center of her forehead was a star-sapphire pattern of light that came from no apparent source. Her features were no more pronounced than those of any other Haydonite the visitors had seen, and yet there were contours that somehow gave her face an individuality. The offworlders had learned that the Haydonites were far from anonymous.
She bowed serenely. "She will be with you presently. You will, after all, wish some privacy for your consultations. There are dangers in this city, as well you know. And now, if you will pardon me, I have other pressing matters to which I must see."
Vince led the way out of the cone-flier, and in another few seconds it was lifting away into
the sky of Glike, among the flying carpets and lolling sky barges.
It was windy and chilly up there, but the view made it worthwhile. Jonathan Wolff unlimbered a telebinocular and looked around. Max glared out angr
ily at the Oz-like urbanscape; he was worried about Miriya and the rest, wishing some direct action were possible.
Vince said, "What I don't get is this business with Vowad, Sarna's father. I mean, jealousy, from a Haydonite?
The emotions of the synthetically spawned Haydonites were usually too subtle for the other Sentinels to detect, or were deeply suppressed. And certainly their family ties were tenuous by outsiders' standards. But the situation between Sarna, Vowad, and Veidt was apparently the exception.
Haydonites didn't so much reproduce as literally create their offspring, as a sort of art form. The young incorporated characteristics of the elders and selected innovations, as esthetic essays, as well.
Wolff lowered the telebinocular. "From what I've been able to pick up since we've been here, Vowad is the ultimate expression of Haydonite development, their Number One," he said. "And Sarna was, sort of, his crowning achievement. Except, she didn't behave quite the way she was supposed to. Got all enthused over Veidt and some radical ideas he had, like resisting the Invid encroachment."
"Where've we heard that before?" Max murmured.
"Thing is," Wolff Went on, "I get the impression that if anybody could keep the Invid from having their way on Haydon IV, it's Vowad. Only, he doesn't seem inclined to do it."
"The whole thing's a little slippery by Haydonite standards, I suppose," Vince said. "The Invid ease their way in with trade arrangements and diplomatic missions, cultural exchanges and all that, and the next thing you know, they're entrenched. Bribed the officials; intimidated or blackmailed the bureaucrats-they've got all the leverage they need around here, more or less."
And if the planet's vaunted defense system ever really existed, the three had come to realize, it found the Invid infiltration/subversion operation too nebulous to deal with. So long as the Invid made no overt moves, they were safe from retribution. And violent transactions between offworlders were, so it seemed, exempt from interference by planetary defenses.
Wolff raised the telebinocular again, scanning. "Heads up," he said softly.
A flying carpet was approaching, a hooked-rug size. In another few seconds, Sarna alighted next to them.
After receiving news that Rick, Lisa, and the others had recovered, she said, "We haven't much time. Matters here are much worse than Veidt and I ever thought when we proposed this plan. We have to get you all off Haydon IV as soon as we can."
Before they could press her for details, she hastened, "You brought your seeing devices? Good; look over there, at the juncture of the Sky Road and Silver Way."
Eventually they focused on the point she was indicating. Vince watched for a moment, then breathed an uncharacteristic, deliberate string of obscenities.
"Yeah; this changes things," Wolff added sardonically.
Far away and below, a slave coffle was being moved along by Inorganic guards toward a rearing, adamantine Invid stronghold that looked brutally out of place in exquisite Glike.
The prisoners, headbanded with metallic straps that glowed with instrumentation, were dirty and disheveled. It was easy to see that they were big, rugged women wearing the remains of their fighting costumes, walking with heads held high, herded by their captors.
"Praxians," Max said softly. "The missing Praxians. They're here!"
Sarna was nodding measuredly. "They were not, as we thought, exterminated; the Invid have many more than that here in the city and elsewhere on Haydon IV. Many, many thousands."
In contrast to the usual lack of extreme emotion in Haydonites, there was loathing in her voice now. "And my father, Vowad, permits it. Permits anything, to preserve his oh-so-important serenity, and this little...Shangri-la, as you Humans might say."
They lowered their binoculars as she went on. "The Regent has brought the proper pressure to bear; he'll have you all in captivity soon, if we don't move quickly. I've arranged for-"
But she got no further, as the sun was blotted out overhead by flying carpets over half an acre in area. On them stood Inorganics: Scrim and Crann and Odeon, weapons ready, along with the Haydonites who were doing the actual flying.
The three REF fighters pulled their Badger assault pistols, ready to fight for their lives, but Sarna said, "No! If you fire first, you'll have done what they want. And Miriya and the others will suffer the more for it. Stay where you are and let me speak for you."
The flying carpets landed so as to ring them in with the sheer drop of the brink at their backs. Vince, Max, and Wolff formed their own security wheel, but kept their machine pistol muzzles pointed at the landing stage surface. They had a few other surprises on their persons beside the Badgers, but going up against Inorganics without mecha of their own would amount to a suicide mission.
They recognized Vowad right away by the bulging cranium and deep red flesh tone, and the enormous lavender star sapphire set in his forehead. He was standing beside the Invid Regent, the Regent's two Hellcats flanking them. The other Haydonites there bore what Vince had learned to recognize as emblems marking them as Respected Elders-the "Old Guard" of the planet, who had made their peace with Invid subversion.
The Inorganics lumbered off the carpets, deploying to encircle the Sentinels. Among the mecha were Armored Officers, somewhat evolved Invid in powered armor, standing some eight feet tall or so, brandishing weapons. Vince couldn't figure out why the defenses of the planet didn't respond to such a show of force-unless either the defenses were a myth or the Haydonites had decreed that those defenses not interfere with the Regent's troops.
The Regent and Vowad alighted, the Hellcats stalking along a pace behind. "You Humans are born troublemakers," the Regent observed. "Always scheming, never still."
"It keeps us amused, kicking you off planet after planet," Jonathan Wolff conceded mildly.
The Regent growled, and his Hellcats showed then-fangs in furious screams. Vowad, seeing his daughter among the Sentinels, intervened before the 'Cats could pounce.
"You will accompany us to where your other companions are being held! There you will be examined for positive identification, and officially remanded to the custody of the Regent, for trial on charges of war crimes."
"Like hell," Max Sterling said, thumbing off his pistols' safeties. "Might as well die right here."
But Sarna leaned to whisper in his ear, "Please! Trust me; there's a way out of this yet, but you must play along for a while. For Miriya's sake, and your unborn's!"
Slowly, unwillingly, Max returned the Badgers to their underarm rigs. Vince and Wolff hesitated, then did the same.
"Veidt or I will send word to you as soon as we can," Sarna whispered as the Invid closed in.
The Regent loomed before them. "How splendid it feels to have your...company...at last!"
Covered by Inorganic guns, the three men were disarmed and ushered aboard the largest flying carpet. Vowad stayed behind, drawing Sarna aside, as the Regent and his troops and prisoners lifted away. The two hovered there, the wind rustling their long robes.
"I detest these uncontrolled emotions you've acquired through your contact with the Sentinels. I command you to stop this foolish sedition," Vowad hissed at her. "I forbid you to bring down the wrath of the Invid upon us."
"Command? Forbid? Those are words only the Invid may use on Haydon IV now; you've seen to that."
"Stop speaking like a madwoman, Sarna! These attitudes of yours are insanity! You never talked like this until you met that accursed Veidt!"
"But, Father, you have the power to unleash our defenses against them-to fight the Invid!"
"And perhaps destroy our whole world in the process?" A gesture of his head indicated the departing Invid and their prisoners.
"What is your Invid war to me? What are the Sentinels? Just a tick of the eternal clock of Haydon IV; a single moment in our lifetime. When they have all passed away, we will be as we have always been and will always be. I will not risk this perfect place for the petty squabbles of the lower orders."
<
br /> "It seems your decision to withhold information from the council was well conceived," Exedore said.
"Regrettably, yes," Lang answered, showing no regret at all.
Anything said before the council went straight to Edwards's ear, and both scientists had thought it unwise to let Edwards know that there was any monopole ore left here on Tirol.
"In my opinion, the battle lines are drawn, and we're only awaiting the opening shot," Lang added. Exedore, who had seen centuries of war, nodded.
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