The Zentraedi Rebellion

by Jack McKinney

  “As MBS reported on Thursday, the all-music satellite network was revealed to be a privately funded surveillance system aimed at monitoring the whereabouts of Zentraedi callers, all of whose WorldPhone links were recorded and traced. An analysis of the free food distributed by the network has shown it to contain a chemical agent that binds with Zentraedi blood and served as yet another monitoring device. Based on information released today by the Ministry of Justice, it now appears that Senator Milburn was the mastermind of Lorelei. Lynn-Minmei, who has hosted a talk show since the network’s inception, has been unavailable for comment …”

  It was brutally hot inside the cramped pilot compartment of Pack One, Wolfe’s tank. The Centaur was parked downtown, at the intersection of Chasm and High Valley Road—a distribution point for drinking water. Max had joined Wolfe there to learn what had gone down between Carson and Leonard at the morning meeting. Two minutes inside the old battlewagon and he was bathed in sweat.

  “So she gave in to his demands.”

  “Completely,” Wolfe said with contempt. “Well, maybe not completely. We’re retaining control of power and telecommunications. But otherwise, Leonard pretty much has run of the place. What he says goes, no matter what Carson or Monument think of his decisions. It sucks. And I still can’t figure why Command would waive their authority.” He looked at Max. “This can’t all be because of Miriya’s disappearance.”

  “I’m sure Reinhardt himself would go to the media with the story rather than surrender Venezuela to the Southlands,” Max said.

  “So what is it, if it isn’t blackmail?”

  Max unsnapped the collar of his shirt and sat down in the gunner’s seat. “It’s politics. In order to be guaranteed what it needs to pull off the Expeditionary mission, the RDF is willing to cede territory to the Southern Cross. How much longer could we have overseen Venezuela, anyway? If this virus hadn’t happened, Leonard would have manufactured a crisis that allowed him to occupy Cavern.”

  Wolfe exhaled wearily. “Tirol better turn out to be worth the effort.” He shook his head. “To save Earth, the RDF has to sacrifice it.”

  “No less to the likes of Leonard and his gang.” Max glanced at Wolfe. “That’s what they are, you know. Thugs, mercenaries, traitors to one cause or another over the past twenty-five years.”

  “What the hell are we supposed to do when Leonard’s tanks or Destroids decide to handle the next demonstration the way they handled the one you witnessed in Brasília? Do I order the Pack to defend the demonstrators and risk starting an all-out war between the RDF and the Southern Cross?”

  Max shook his head. “We intervene, but we don’t fire on them. We’d only get our butts kicked in the long run, anyway. And then where would the city be?”

  Wolfe clenched his fists. “I hate having my hands tied like this. I’m worried Leonard’s going to try to provoke me. We have to get to any source of trouble before he does. There’ve already been four separate mob attacks on Zentraedi neighborhoods. And guess who’s gonna come out on top if Leonard shows up at the next one? Not the Zentraedi, that’s for damn sure.”

  “It goes beyond prejudice with him. He has some reason for hating the Zentraedi in a personal way.”

  “Any idea why?”

  Max thought about Rolf Emerson’s statement that Leonard had once taken a Zentraedi lover. “Nope.”

  “Max,” Wolfe said tentatively, “what would you say to getting out of here?”

  “How do you mean?”

  “I mean taking Skull Team and the Wolfe Pack and all our families out of this place before the shit hits the fan. I know it sounds like desertion, and I know we’ll be breaking the quarantine, but I prefer to think of it as saving lives.”

  “Our lives,” Max said harshly.

  “So what’s wrong with that? You said yourself Venezuela’s a lost cause. So the RDF is just pulling out a little early.”

  Max stood up, almost cracking his head open. “First of all, our leaving would give Leonard control over everyone here, which means the Zentraedi won’t have a prayer. Second, one of us could be harboring the virus. And finally, the whole lot of us would be court-martialed and probably end up spending the next five years in the brig. Are you willing to risk that?”

  Wolfe ran a hand down his face. “I’m worried about Catherine and Johnny,” he said, after a moment. “I tried to convince her to go to one of the shelters, but she wouldn’t listen. She figures her job comes first.”

  Max’s expression softened. “Where does that leave Johnny?”

  “Geena Bartley was planning to move Rook into a shelter. I’m hoping she took Johnny with her.”

  A comtone sounded and Wolfe reached for the radio. He listened for a long moment, in obvious and ever-increasing alarm, and was ashen-faced when he turned to Max.

  “The bastard has done it. There was a riot outside a shelter set up and staffed by Zentraedi. Leonard ordered his troops to put it down with force. They fired on the crowd indiscriminately. At least twenty people are dead; maybe three times that many wounded.” He paused for a moment, numbed by his own words. “It was the shelter Geena was taking Rook to.”

  Anatole Leonard’s bullet-shaped, shaved head filled the screen of the vidphone. “Well, Captain Sterling, we meet at last,” he said in his humorless baritone. “Not exactly face-to-face, but that’s probably for the best.”

  Max wasted no time setting the tone of the call. “You crazy sonofabitch. Do you know how many people you killed at that shelter?”

  “We were merely maintaining the peace.”

  “Like you were in Brasília?”

  “My troops may have been somewhat overeager, it’s true. As for the deaths, I’m afraid there wasn’t time to sort the innocent from the guilty.”

  “By guilty, you must mean the Zentraedi, since they accounted for most of the casualties.”

  “That my troops couldn’t distinguish them from Cavern City’s Human populace is surely a testament to how well the aliens have blended in.”

  “Wolfe’s son was there, Leonard.”

  Leonard didn’t respond immediately. “My sympathies to the captain.”

  “Lucky for you, he survived the attack. But then I suppose you couldn’t imagine Wolfe’s distress, could you, Field Marshal? You don’t have a son, or a family.”

  Leonard was stone-faced. “Come to the purpose of this call, Sterling. I’m too busy to indulge in games or name-calling.”

  Max leaned away from the phone’s camera. “You’re not here out of altruism. Cavern’s nothing but a target of opportunity. So much the better if several hundred Zentraedi die in the campaign.”

  Leonard snorted a laugh. “The Southern Cross will always be indebted to you for the plague you helped bring here. Though I must admit I’m surprised that you weren’t more circumspect about procedure after witnessing the deaths of the three Scavengers you captured. The Zentraedi we found at the Stinger base robbed us of the pleasure of observing their mass suicide. But perhaps you thought that biological warfare was beneath the malcontents? I’ll wager that your wife could have told you differently.” He grinned. “Have you heard from her, by the way? I understand that the Scavengers are always looking for able-bodied recruits.”

  “Don’t expect an easy victory over this city, Leonard. Not while I’m here.”

  “Yes, and it’s a pity you are here, Sterling—in more ways than one. After all, if it wasn’t for the quarantine, you could be out tracking down your better half. Or is that alien half? In any case, I’ll be sure to let you know if the Southern Cross encounters her while it’s out locating and destroying malcontent camps.”

  She had been placed for safekeeping inside a ramshackle hut, but she was more a prisoner of her thoughts than the hut’s walls of sticks and dried mud. She had killed them—killed Seloy, killed Seloy’s child. The deaths had drained her of any emotions engendered by the years of living with Max, and of coming to love him and Dana. She was in the hold of the Imperative once more,
thinking only of her own survival.

  When she heard the crude wooden door open, she thought it might be her jailer—a willowy thing with white hair—or any one of the Scavengers who had hurried to the sounds of gunfire in Seloy’s house: Marla Stenik, Vivek Bross, or the scientist, Xan Norri. But instead it turned out to be Ranoc Nomarre, accompanied by a second member of the New Unity, a hulking, bald-headed giant of a man with a patch over one eye. Leida, she recalled, from her short stay in their camp.

  Both wore faded T-shirts and baggy pants. The weapon Ranoc was pointing at her fired conventional projectiles—though ones of sufficiently large caliber. Leida’s handgun was smaller but equally lethal.

  “Miriya Parina,” Ranoc said, “you have been found guilty of crimes against the T’sentrati—”

  “Sesannu!” she said, cutting him off. “I’m aware of my crimes, Ranoc, but you were not appointed my executioner. The Scavengers reserve that right for themselves.”

  His upper lip curled, revealing rotting teeth. “Don’t assume that I care what these females have to say. I’ve suspected all along that you were a traitor, and now you’ve proven it by killing Seloy and the adopted Human child. Still fearful of your status as a Quadrano, the Scavengers are afraid to act, but I am not.” He leveled the gun. “You will not escape again.”

  Impervious to the possible consequences, Miriya hurled herself at Leida, catching him around his middle and driving him back against the door. As the big man slid down on his tailbone, she scrambled behind him and locked her forearms around the front of his neck. His powerful hands fastened on her arms. The gun slipped from his grasp, but she was slow in retrieving it. Ranoc fired, grazing the top of her left shoulder. But by then she had Leida’s gun in hand. Her shots slammed into Ranoc’s chest and he died.

  “Traitor,” Leida hissed, struggling to get to his feet.

  She killed him with a shot to the head.

  She stood still for a moment, thinking only about what had to be done, satisfied to be empty of feeling.

  She picked up Ranoc’s weapon and walked to the door, expecting to face a charge, but no one was in sight. Off to one side lay the white-haired guard Ranoc had killed on his way in. Miriya stepped outside.

  “Deng yar—don’t move!” someone yelled from a nearby observation tower. A round whistled past her left cheek and tore through the wall of the hut.

  Miriya saw the shooter and returned fire, toppling her from the platform of the tower.

  Bleeding from the shoulder, she headed out, not furtively but openly, spoiling for confrontations and shooting at anyone who appeared, hitting the majority of her targets. Surrendering to the Imperative and the skills it had afforded her in a lifetime of combat.

  She could see the Stinger from one hundred yards away, reflective where the sunlight found it, towering over everything in the vicinity except for the trees themselves. That the mecha was in camp and not secreted in the valley below identified it as the one Seloy had selected to fly Miriya and Hirano to Mexico.

  She moved toward it. The throbbing pain in her shoulder was superseded by a searing in her left leg; she smelled singed cloth and flesh. Keep moving, ignore the distress, kill that which impedes your progress, attain your goal, kill that which stands in your way, save yourself … This wasn’t something she told herself but something recited to her by the Imperative.

  Access to the Stinger’s cockpit was via a tall wooden ladder. Miriya began to climb, firing on moving targets below and taking another round in the leg, behind the knee. It pleased her that she had managed to throw the camp into chaos. She dragged herself upward, relying on the strength of her upper body, and tumbled into the cockpit.

  A glance at the consoles told her that she could pilot the thing. Anyone who had mastered Female Power Armor could master a Stinger; only the weapons systems were unfamiliar.

  The helmet and waldos were a tight fit. She activated an array of controls and the mecha powered up. It lifted off, rounds pinging against the armored exterior.

  She was dizzy, but she refused to surrender to the disorientation and pain; if need be, she would push her body to the point of death. The closest RDF base was Cavern City, but Cavern would be busy coping with the virus. It was Mexico or nowhere. But would the RDF blow her out of the sky before she had a chance to identify herself? Was the Stinger even equipped with a radio? And what if the mecha was armed with virused shuttles? Would its destruction vector the disease to a new population?

  These were possibly pointless concerns, since two of the Scavengers’ Stingers were already in pursuit. She maxed power to the engines, but could neither escape nor evade them. So she took them on.

  The pilot of the first was an unworthy adversary. Miriya’s tactics were too subtle; she rid herself of the mecha with little effort. The second pilot, however, was adept. She divined Miriya’s every move, and at times literally flew circles around her. She placed her missiles with surgical precision, as if she wanted to take Miriya alive.

  Miriya’s ship was flashing warnings and belching smoke when a voice blared from a concealed speaker.

  “T’sen Parina, your Stinger is crippled. Will you yield?”

  Miriya thought she recognized the woman behind the voice: Seloy’s small-boned, pixie-eared lieutenant. “T’sen Voss?”

  “I am honored to be recognized. I have great respect for you, T’sen Parina, as a fighter and as a woman. I always believed that you, more than any, understood and followed the true path of the T’sentrati. I do not know your reasons for killing Seloy and her child, but your actions have not lessened my respect for you. I won’t be the one to kill you.”

  Miriya searched for the radio controls to no avail. Finally, she simply spoke to the air: “You honor yourself, T’sen Bross—Vivik. Will you abandon the cause and join me?”

  “I cannot.”

  Miriya felt nauseated. “The Scavengers will know that you allowed me to escape, Vivik. You’ll be executed.”

  “Just the same, I won’t kill you.”

  “Then come with—”

  “I salute you, Miriya Parina.”

  Miriya sensed what was coming. “Vivik, no!”

  Bross’s Stinger hovered in the air for a moment, then came apart in an expanding sphere of fire and smoke.

  Miriya put her face in her hands, grieving for the imminent death of her race.

  CHAPTER

  TWENTY-EIGHT

  The two technicians responsible for orchestrating “Jeng Chiang’s” live-video message to Breetai were apprehended during an RDF raid on a malcontent camp located in southern Mexico and charged with acts of conspiracy, sedition, and sabotage. As part of their plea bargain, however, they allowed that they had indeed arranged for the transmission of Chiang’s Little White Dragon “in-take” [sic] to Breetai’s quarters. Though long suspected, Chiang was not positively identified as Lynn-Kyle until after the SDF-3 launched for Tirol with Kyle aboard. (See Versace’s Malcontent: Confessions of a Sympathizer.) A videotape of the in-take that thwarted Theofre Elmikk’s plan to seize the SDF-3 is rumored to exist.

  footnote in Daluce’s Bridge to an Uncertain Future: Earth Between the Wars

  On the phone, Minmei asked him to meet her at a scenic overlook located just off the main highway a few miles north of Monument City. Her rental car was already in the small lot when he arrived on a borrowed Marauder motorcycle; otherwise, it appeared they had the place to themselves. Dressed Western, with her long hair ponytailed, Minmei was standing at the railing of a concrete balcony that afforded a panorama of the valley and the mountainous terrain east and north of the city. The day was warm and cloudless, and the view seemed to go on forever.

  They embraced, and she thanked him for coming. “I would have suggested a restaurant in town, but the media is still hounding me about the Lorelei Scandal.”

  “I figured,” Rick said, setting the motorcycle helmet down and taking off the leather jacket.

  “Why do dungs like this keep happening to me, Rick?
Now I have to look like a jerk for not knowing what was going on. Or—worse—a racist, which you know I’m not. Either way, my voice has been used as a weapon again. Like it’s not enough that Lang expects me and Janice to sing away the next wave of invaders from space.”

  “There was no way you could have known what Milburn and the rest were doing. Even we didn’t know. And another embarrassment was the last thing the RDF needed right now.”

  “I guess. But I’m sick of everything going wrong in my life. Every decision I make is jinxed.”

  “At least you found a partner.”

  Minmei made a face. “That’s probably going to end badly, too. I mean, Janice is the strangest person. And talk about an embarrassment, it’s like she doesn’t care who she offends with her comments—excuse me, her ‘honesty.’ ”

  “That must be the Lang side of her lineage coming out. Look how weird he is.”

  Minmei laughed, hugged Rick, then swiftly backed out of his embrace and punched him solidly in the arm.

  “Hey, what’s that for?” he said, massaging his right biceps.

  She folded her arms and scowled. “For getting engaged.”

  “Minmei—”

  “Oh, you know I don’t mean it. I’m happy for both of you—sort of. I just wish I had someone in my life. I try to look into the future, and all I see are more tours, more clubs, more interviews … I announce to the whole world that ‘Lynn-Minmei is going to take a new direction,’ and here I am, three years later, in exactly the same place: touring, avoiding the press, the center of controversy, Earth’s most powerful weapon.” She shut her eyes and shook her head. “I’m always getting involved with the wrong people.”

  “Thanks loads.”

  “I didn’t mean you, silly. I was thinking of Kyle, and now Senator Milburn … I still can’t believe I had dinner with that man a week before the scandal broke and he never said a word about having an interest in Lorelei. Even though Janice kept talking about the ‘politics’ of the network.”