Tesla sensed what was going on and strove to reassert his dominance over Jack, sending a mental bolt at him just as he went to grapple with Burak. Jack somehow endured the attack, but he was off balance.
Knocking aside Jack's clumsy defense, Burak used an instinctive attack, one the Sentinels hadn't seen from a Perytonian yet, and that Jack wouldn't be looking for. Rather than use hands or feet, Burak faked, then lowered his head and gored Jack Baker.
The long, dart-keen, tapered horns ripped through the tough fabric of the man's uniform and through flesh and muscle, opening twin channels across his midsection. One horn hung up on a rib, and Burak was pulled off balance. Jack managed to land a hammer blow to the base of Burak's neck with his fist, but the Perytonian lifted him from his feet and dropped him like a bull tossing a matador.
As Jack fell, Burak looked around dizzily for his gun. But a burst from a Badger made him duck, and he rushed madly for the bunker's entrance. Karen fired again, but with no way to aim, she was lucky she just stitched a line of shots across the ceiling.
Lucky I didn't shoot my own young tush off! she told herself.
As it was, she had through some miracle managed to squirm over to Burak's gun, rolling over it backward to get it.
As Burak fled, he kicked something that skittered ahead of him. He instinctively scooped it up as he ran, barely breaking stride: Jack's comset, which had bounced loose in the struggle.
Karen fired one more burst blindly, then let Burak go and set the Badger aside. She went back to work on the makeshift bonds. By the time she had her wrists loosened up a bit, the rumble of her ascending VT shook the air.
Burak didn't have the flight helmet, but with luck and a little skill he could get back to Tesla using sheer manual controls.
Other hands, slick with blood, fumbled to help Karen free herself. In seconds she was kneeling by Jack, and he curled back on the floor. The goring had been savage, and he was losing blood fast. But she could see that he had shaken off Tesla's influence.
She looked around for her flight helmet to call for a medevac but saw it lying in pieces, an inadvertent victim of one of her own unaimed bursts.
Jack managed a pale ghost of one of those maddening grins. "Isn't Prince Charming supposed to awaken Sleeping Beauty with the kiss? Penn, can't you get anything right?"
Armed with all the non-Protoculture weaponry they had been able to muster, the Sentinels dropped into Beroth to throw themselves in on the side of the blinking Invid.
If the Brain had been more devious, it might have had its troops imitate Tesla's strobe signals and confuse things again. But, an aging and somewhat obsolescent organism, it practiced only the standard, brute tactics of Invid warfare.
The Sentinels had come in armed with everything from Karbarran pneumatics to Garudan slingshots, but most were carrying REF-style non-Protoculture weapons. Even the Praxians had put aside their polearms and swords and dart-throwers willingly for submachine guns loaded with explosive bullets, heavy machine guns that fired discarding-sabot rounds, and portable recoilless rifles.
There were also mortars, flame guns, Garudan things that squirted molecular acid, blowtorches, and a lot more. The VTs and the few remaining Hovertanks couldn't use Protoculture weapons either, of course, but there had only been time to retrofit a few of them with old-style autocannon and rocket pods. Still, even lacking firearms, a multi-ton mecha throwing armored punches or swinging a superalloy club as long as a utility pole could do a lot of damage.
It was easy to sort out friend from foe; Tesla's new subjects' cyclopean eyes flashed brightly. The Sentinels launched themselves into the fray with that same hunger for revenge and victory that they had brought to other battles.
But Tesla was beginning to feel misgivings. Burak was already on his way back with the Fruit-slowly, because he wasn't used to handling a VT, and certainly not without the special thinking-cap flight helmet-but the Sentinels might discover Tesla's treachery at any time, if Baker or Penn could get word back somehow.
Was it luck or was it the Shaping of the Protoculture that Penn's helmet had been shot up and Baker's comset taken by Burak? Tesla steeled himself against doubts. Though every Inorganic he could command was sorely needed in the battle, he detached several and sent them toward the bunker, to do away with two troublesome Humans before they could interfere any further.
In the meantime, sensing the deployment of the Sentinels and the manner in which the battle was taking shape, he began a series of strategic withdrawals, in order to shift the
burden of the fighting over to his former captors. He would need his own troops for other things.
On Optera the Regent, still dripping from nutrient immersion, viewed a recording of the brief fragment of message that his Spheris garrison had managed to send.
"Under attack by-"
Then the screen went blank, because the main communications installation had been the first thing against which Tesla directed his troops' fire.
But the Regent could hardly know that. He could only quake with rage and fright, that an enemy could so suddenly overwhelm his most important remaining stronghold outside of Optera.
Burak barely survived his landing, crumpling the Guardian's powerful leg under it with a creaking of metal, and stoving in the radome.
"Can you fly it?" Tesla demanded of Gnea.
She shook her head somewhat groggily; leakage from Tesla's mind let bits and pieces of the fierce battle through into her own. "Not without a helmet."
Tesla roared and reached out to swat her like a bug; she never even flinched. But he stopped himself, realizing that she might be of some further use. Burak emerged from the keeled-over Guardian hobbling, somehow contriving to carry the bundled Fruit. The ring of flashing-eyed troops that Tesla had drawn around the area to protect himself opened for Burak.
By the time the Perytonian was dragging himself up the ramp to join him on the landing platform, Tesla was already issuing new marching orders to his usurped army.
Just then a contact signal came from the communicator on Gnea's belt. It was Lisa Hunter's voice over the command freq. "Tesla, get your eastern and northern elements going in a pincer movement, do you read me? What they're doing now is worse than useless!"
Tesla took the comset in his now-dexterous hand. "Oh yes! I read you, female; have no fear."
He broke the contact, but continued what he was doing. His objective now was the troopships on the other side of the city; the Brain was too well guarded, and he had sworn
never to go back into Human captivity.
The VTs the Sentinels had been able to field had already hit some of the tanker ships in port, sending tidal waves of nutrient fluid washing outward. But the troopships stationed there in long-term ground positions were, in accordance with military procedure, camouflaged against space attack-just as the Terror Weapons on Tirol had been. They were still there awaiting Tesla's pleasure.
"And then on to Optera!" he cried, shaking his fist at the sky.
"No!" It was Burak, limping toward Tesla with a wild look on his face and Jack's blood still glistening darkly on his horns. He dropped the bundles of Fruit and stepped back from them.
"Not Optera; Peryton! You promised!"
Tesla, furious, sent out a mental bolt that almost flattened Burak. How the Perytonian had slipped his mental leash, Tesla had no idea, except that Tesla's concentration was divided among so many things.
But Burak withstood the bolt somehow and held up Jack Baker's comset. His thumb was on its special switch, the one that would trigger the charge in Tesla's resplendent collar. "Pery...ton," Burak got out between locked teeth.
Tesla felt immense amusement and savage wrath at the same time. "Is that so? Behold!"
Suddenly the unpickable locks that clasped the collar around his neck clicked open. At the same time, Burak found that he couldn't move, not so much as the thumb that rested on the deadly button.
Tesla took the coll
ar and hurled it far from him; there would be more of such baubles than he could count once he had taken his rightful place. He reached out to push Burak's thumb; there was a loud report from the exploding bib, down somewhere in the lower levels of the landing platform area.
Tesla still had three valuable hostages, an army of Inorganics, and his newfound powers. He had no doubt now that he would prevail.
"Very well, all of you; we're going to-"
But as he turned, he let out an enraged bellow. Veidt was gone. Gnea was befuddled, swearing that he had been there, with her Badger trained on him, only seconds before. From where he had floated, cornered, Veidt could only have plunged over the edge of the platform and down into the darkened levels far below.
Only, who knew what such a fall meant to a Haydonite? No time to wonder now. Tesla issued a mental order, and Gnea and Burak gathered up the Fruit, then closed ranks behind him. Together, they descended to fall in behind a flying wedge of Inorganics, to battle their way toward the spaceport.
Odeons lifted them up and carried them swiftly.
The Invid had thought the arms room a place safe from Spherisian intrusion-firstly, because it held Protoculture weapons the locals dreaded; secondly, because it was an enclosure cut off from the Crystal Highways.
The invaders never thought to consider their own thick bundles of fiber-optic filaments-thick cables of silicon-based strands. That same system was accessible elsewhere.
In one corner of the room, two cables swelled and swelled, expanding, drawing in more material from floors above and below, until at last the insulation around them was blown away in shreds. The filaments curled and fused, taking on humanoid form.
This time, Baldan found himself all but transparent, the light shifting within him as if he were a fortune-teller's ball come alive. Teal was now composed of the same clear stuff, though her body was still unmistakably female.
He shook his head to clear it of the ringing. The last stretch, through the Invid cable system, had been resonant with their incomprehensible battle signals rather than with the songs of the Highways.
"Why are we here, Baldan? And where are we?"
He set off among the rearing racks of outsize Invid weapons. "We're here because it isn't right that Spherisians let others do their fighting and dying for them. It isn't just. It cheapens freedom."
He's not using Baldan II's voice, Teal told herself. Those are his father's words, and no mistaking it.
He came at last to what he was searching for: a row of heavy Enforcer rifles. They weren't even locked up. He lifted one, making sure that its charge was full. As heavy as it was, he handled it easily; his structure was stronger than that of ordinary flesh and blood. Teal saw that he was drawing on Baldan I's memories as much as he was upon the training Bela and the others had given him.
He heard a quiet clicking and turned to see Teal checking over a second rifle. "No!" he said softly. "Where I go from here you cannot follow."
She held the rifle resolutely. "You complain because Spherisians won't fight, and now you lose your composure because one wants to! Make up your mind, young man."
The features of his face slid around into a wry look, then straightened again. "Keep your head down, Mother."
They stole out along Invid-style corridors, through the great hive. They were near the innermost sanctum, having bypassed ring upon ring of sentries and guardposts and surveillance by means of the Crystal Highways. In moments they hung back in the shadows of a structure like a huge fibroblast, looking out at the Invid Brain that held sway over most of the occupying army.
It was pulsing and emitting strange sounds, so agitated and apprehensive that even the two intruders could sense it clearly. The battle wasn't going well.
There was a handpicked elite of Officers and Enforcers around the Brain, conferring in low tones and attending it. Baldan looked to his mother, raising his chin and brows inquiringly.
What misplaced practical joke of the Protoculture brought me here? she carped to herself. All she had ever wanted to do was enjoy life and the attentions of admirers, to let her beauty speak for itself and languish in the adulation that everyone seemed eager to accord her.
But she nodded to her son that she was ready. The two leapt out to either side of the cover, rifle muzzles at waist level, firing Protoculture blasts.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
Tesla was very troubled in the last hours before the attack. When I asked him about it, I expected one of his evasive numbers or egomaniacal silences.
But he seemed to need to talk to someone. He was psychotic by then, I think; the lab people conjecture that he'd actually been increasing his chromosome numbers.
At any rate, he said, "I have had a recurring dream lately. A great phoenix of mind-force rises from a small blue-white world and soars away to another plane of existence. It fills me with apprehension."
Lisa Hayes Hunter, Recollections
Karen had seen to Jack's wounds as best she could, but he went into shock, still losing blood. It came down to a simple choice of leaving him there and going for help, or staying
with him and watching him die.
Then the decision was taken away from her. A Hellcat bounded into sight at the bunker's entrance, showing its glowing fangs. Its eyes were flashing rhythmically; it was one of Tesla's.
Three had originally been dispatched by Tesla to keep Karen and Jack from getting word of his treachery back to the Sentinels. But an ambush by the Brain's forces had cut down the other two 'Cats.
Tesla had picked the feline-shape for the job because it was smaller and more limber than the biped Inorganics. Now, it slunk into the entranceway of the bunker on all fours, belly scraping sparks from the gleaming floor, yeowling at its prey.
Karen was already trying to drag Jack back to safety, but the side doors were all secured. So at last she wound up crouched, with Jack, against the dead end of the entrance-way's rear wall. The Robobeast edged nearer, its strobing eyes lighting the darkness, claws gouging the quartz-hard floor.
Karen raised Jack's pistol and her own side-by-side and opened fire. The 'Cat screamed and lowered its head, shielding its eyes, but kept coming; it had little to fear from a conventional handgun. One paw reached out to slice her wide open.
But it missed because it was being yanked backward. It turned to grapple with something Karen couldn't see, unable to get any fighting room in the confinement of the entranceway.
Then it was gone, dragged into the open, and there was a monstrous clash going on outside. Karen rushed to the entrance, looking for Skull colors; nothing short of a mecha could have jerked the Hellcat out of the bunker tail-first.
She was right. It was an Odeon, rolling with and slugging the smaller 'Cat. Another Odeon joined it, its nose-tentacle flickering out to ensnare the Hellcat. In another moment, they were socking and kicking the thing, dismembering it. Their optical sensors were not flashing.
Karen thought about making a dash for it, but she couldn't leave Jack behind. The Odeons were rising from their savage battle and turning their attention to her.
She backed into the shadows once more; they closed in. But as the nasal whips curled and snapped at her, a stream of depleted-transuranic slugs the size of candlepins hit them.
Karen spun and threw herself headlong, shielding her face. The Odeons, holed through and through, leaked green nutrient fluid for a moment as their systemry fizzled, then they
collapsed, smoke and flame belching from their split seams. They ruptured open with explosions that mingled with the sounds of a descending Alpha's thrusters.
Karen had sat up again, face smudged and pallid. The VT was in Guardian mode, its canopy raised now as the pilot stood. Blaze's light reflected off a well-remembered flight helmet, one cast in the image of a Praxian war helm.
"Well, well! Maybe when we get a moment, you can tell me why two enemy slugs killed & friendly 'Cat that was in turn just about to eat a Sentinel!"
"Tesla! Ark Angel to Tesla!"
"Still no acknowledgment, Captain," the Human commo officer told Lisa.
"Keep trying anyway," she said. To the mike, she repeated, "Your troops' lines are collapsing in all sectors! You must get them to stand fast!"
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