Rubicon

by Jack McKinney

  “Burak and his people are aware of these things,” Janice said. “Thanks mostly to Zor. He went to Peryton directly from Haydon IV and seeded vast areas of the planet. What wasn’t destroyed in the wake of the battle was apparently left wondrously fertile. The Flowers flourished, and he was convinced that their mere presence would help heal the planet once this so-called curse was lifted.”

  Rem wore a brooding expression—the one he seemed to adopt lately whenever Zor’s name was mentioned. He had said little, interrupting her only once to ask about the Macassar’s children—the two sons he had lost that fateful day. “And did Zor tell them exactly how that could be achieved?” he asked Janice now.

  She nodded and told him. “Their own myths and legends had pointed to the shrine, but no one knew precisely what was to be done there. When the Rowers drew the Invid to Peryton, the Regent learned about the curse and constructed a fortified hive over the site of the shrine. It benefited them to allow the curse to continue because of the fecund ground the battle left behind; but in fact they couldn’t have ended it if they wanted to. What had been tortured from Peryton captives was nothing more than a mixture of half-truths and rumors. The Macassar’s utterances had become hopelessly garbled.”

  Or until such time as two willingly give up their lives that my children might live, Rem repeated to himself. “Have you told Burak yet?”

  “Not yet.”

  “Why? He has a right to know.”

  Janice heard the harshness in his voice and said, “Because he has a role to play.”

  “As I do, you’re saying. As that part of me I can’t touch does. The thoughts and feelings that aren’t mine—”

  She stopped him before he could go any further, putting her fingertips to his lips. “I’m not asking anything of you. Don’t liken me to one of your enemies.”

  He kissed her fingers, a woman’s hand despite the Protoculture currents that coursed through her.

  Or were they only warm to his touch, Rem asked himself, a prisoner of that Robotech power? Would that his donor’s thoughts could reveal the role he had to play in these affairs of heart and mind. Until then the curse was on him also, an enigmatic timestrip he rode alone.

  “Now let me get this straight,” Rick was saying to Burak on another level of the ship. “All we have to do is take out the hive and we take care of this … curse?”

  “Just clear the Invid from our midst, Earther,” Burak said, “and I will attend to the curse.”

  He had given the Sentinels a slightly different version of the events. As a result, perhaps, of what a thousand years of battle had done to the truth; but more likely because he had been worried about scaring the Ark Angel off. Things were already tenuous enough, what with the Regent on the run and Optera almost close enough to touch; so how would Peryton have stood a chance if he had told Rick and the others the full story? After all, the hive and the orchards were the central concerns, weren’t they? Just wipe out the Invid like they had done on Karbarra and the rest, and give him some breathing space to deal with the curse. The Perytonian messiah. The Möbius battle itself was of little consequence, he had maintained.

  What he had failed to mention was how easy it was to die if the cursed thing chanced your way.

  Consequently, the Ark Angel’s Human and XT command had come to think of the battle as a kind of spectral, immaterial event—one that couldn’t actually touch them. Rick was doing a lot of head-scratching over it, nevertheless, and wished that Janice and Rem hadn’t decided to absent themselves from the briefing. He turned to Garak and Pye now, their thick necks still showing nasty-looking maculations from Burak’s recent deathgrip.

  “Run it down again. You’ve got orchards growing all over the planet. This, uh, battle sweeps through, you go out and seed the place, harvest the Fruits later on and bring them back to the hive for processing.”

  Garak nodded his snaillike head.

  Rick saw Karen Perm and some of the Amazon hand-fighter contingent shaking their heads in a baffled way. “I thought we hit the food supply on Garuda,” she said. “Peryton sounds like a regular garden.”

  “Garudan Fruits provided nutrient for the mecha chambers,” Pye explained. “Peryton’s Fruits are the Regent’s special crop.”

  Rick puzzled over it for a moment, while Kami, Learna, and Quias plied the Invid scientists with further questions. Rick was about to ask just what made the Perytonian variety so special when Bela said, “And the planet’s course never interferes with your operations?”

  Garak risked a gaze at Burak and his mob, who were suddenly glowering in his direction. He gulped and found his voice. “No, no, never. It just, well, happens, you understand? Springs up in daylight, leaves at night …”

  “You make it sound like an offshore breeze, Invid,” Lron said with an ursine growl from across the hold. Doc Obu led Crysta and the other Karbarrans in a grumbling session. “What are your numbers there?”

  Similar to Spheris, Garak told him. Although it was likely that the Regent had recalled some of the garrison to Optera—the troopships certainly.

  As everyone was moving off to their stations, Rick spied Veidt across the hold and waved him over. “Well,” he said, when the armless Haydonite had hovered into mindshot, “what do you think?” He heard a bellike sound in his mind before Veidt’s short telepathic statement took shape.

  They are lying.

  In low orbit over Optera, Tesla’s improvised flagship shuddered and belched fire as plasma probes from Edwards’s fortress caught it unawares. Reports poured into the flagship’s living computer, which in turn sent Invid techs and maintenance personnel scurrying through the ship’s arteriallike passageways to attend the hull damage and crippled systems. On the bridge, a pulsating ventricle of visceral color, Tesla muttered a Praxian curse and eased himself back into the command throne.

  “What was that?” he asked one of the techs.

  The creature bowed as it turned to him, accessing data from an instrumentality sphere positioned near the main viewscreens. “Energy bolt, Lord Tesla. Enemy ship coming into view—”

  Tesla took hold of the graceful neck of the chair’s overhead sensor as two more explosions jarred the ship. There was more surprise in his expression than concern; he had assumed that the Regent would return to a defensive stance now that the strike ships of his Special Children were being beaten back. But here he was attacking the troop carriers themselves. Tesla demanded to know how this new threat had broken through.

  “It is not an Invid ship, Lord Tesla.”

  “Then what?” he barked from the chair.

  “Robotech,” the tech said as an image formed on the screen.

  Tesla stared at it a moment, mistaking it for the Ark Angel and wondering how the Sentinels had been able to catch up with him. Tesla had folded his flotilla to Optera from Spheris, whereas the SDF-7 was only capable of achieving superluminal speeds.

  “The fools!” he shouted to no one in particular. “Doesn’t Hunter realize I’m doing him a favor? Would he destroy me for desertion when I could help him end the war?”

  “Robotech mecha closing on the flagship, Lord Tesla. Veritech fighters.”

  Tesla watched the screen. Two pinpoint formations of light were on the attack. “Recall two squadrons of Pincer Ships from the surface—quickly!”

  The tech bent to his task. At the same time Tesla called for an intensified view of the robotech vessel; as he continued to study the image, he saw that it wasn’t the Ark Angel after all.

  “Open a com frequency to that ship,” he ordered, arranging himself in front of the video transmitters for maximum effect.

  But his carefully constructed presentation collapsed a moment later when two Invid Inorganics—two trollike Scrim—came on-screen, peering at him from stations on the enemy bridge. “Whaaat the …” Tesla began, as the camera enlarged its field of view to show a slice of bubble-chambered brain. Seated nearby and flanked by two Hellcats was a blond-haired, skullcapped Human wearing a neura
l handband.

  Tesla felt a shiver of fear work its way through him. An Earther in control of Inorganics? An Earther in contact with one of the living computers? Had the Regent struck some sort of deal; turned the REF and the Sentinels against him? What was happening to the master plan, the Fruit of the Fruits?

  A barrage of plasma fire found an unshielded spot on the flagship’s belly and threw a spasm through the bridge ventricle. Techs and soldiers shut down momentarily, while the onboard brain fought to resecure its hold.

  The Human—Edwards, Tesla recalled—was smirking for the lens; but catching sight of Tesla now, he came slowly to his feet, advancing toward the camera with a shocked look on his face.

  “Are you the Regess?” Edwards asked, alarmed by the sight of Tesla in his transfigured state.

  Tesla took heart and puffed out his chest. Easy enough for the Human to make such an assumption; but Tesla found it somehow distasteful to be confused with the Queen-Mother. “I am Tesla, lord of the Invid,” he announced in the Earth tongue for added impact.

  He hadn’t expected Edwards to laugh.

  “Tesla,” Edwards was saying, that grin back in place. “Tesla, lord of the Invid. Well, that’s a hoot. What the hell you been eating, Tesla? You look like you gained weight.”

  “Robotech mecha continuing to close, m’lord,” a tech reported. “The living computer recommends withdrawal—”

  “Quiet, grub!” Tesla told him too late.

  Edwards wagged a finger for the lens. “Hear that, mutant? Retreat.” He turned to stare, hands raised to the neural headband, at his own slice of brain. “My computer agrees,” he added, swinging around. “Odds don’t look good. I know you’re stretched to the limit—can’t even fire back, can you?”

  Tesla looked at a lieutenant, who shook its head.

  “Robotech fighters firing: rockets away. Prepare for impact …”

  Tesla shook his fists in the air as two dozen warheads stitched fire across the flagship’s ventral hull. “Where are the Pincers?” he screamed.

  “The Regent’s Special Children have rallied, Lord Tesla,” a tech updated. “The Pincers are sustaining heavy losses. Squadrons are en route to our position in significantly reduced numbers.”

  “Number One’s kicking ass and takin’ names,” Edwards said when Tesla returned his attention to the screen. “Your boys’ll never make it back in time.”

  Tesla saw the Human nod his head to someone off-screen.

  “Prepare for plasma fire—”

  Tesla picked himself up from the floor, waving a hand to clear pungent smoke from his eyes. Edwards was smiling at him.

  “I’m willing to give you a chance, mutant. Take your troopships to Peryton and engage the Ark Angel. In the meantime I’ll try to put in a few good words for you down below. Who knows, maybe the Regent’ll welcome you back into the fold if you can prove yourself useful.”

  Tesla shook a trembling fist. “I am Tesla, lord of the—”

  “Save it,” Edwards cut him off, the smile gone. “Your ship is targeted for destruction. Counting down from sixty …”

  Decision time, Rick told himself, pacing away from a large screen in the Ark Angel’s Tactical Information Center. The cruiser was only hours out from Peryton now, and command had yet to come up with a plan that satisfied the ship’s numerous contingents.

  Veidt had explained what he knew of Peryton’s situation from records kept on Haydon, sending whatever hopes the Sentinels had of a quick settlement into a nosedive. The battle was not some immaterial event, Veidt had explained, but an event that took place in the real world. And all of a sudden the Karbarrans were acting like they wanted no part of the invasion—not until recon teams established for themselves the nature of the planet’s curse. They were actually in favor of transporting volunteers up from the planet’s surface to get a kind of consensus of opinion. Moreover, Rick suspected that there was something like superstition at work among the ursinoids, though he could hardly blame them for it. And the fact that the Garudans subscribed to this added to his concern, because he had come to trust in the vulpine’s Sendings, as they were called. The Praxians—among whose numbers Rick now listed Lisa, Karen, Teal, and Baldan—were willing to believe that they could contend with whatever Peryton threw their way. The Perytonians themselves had opted to put all their faith in Burak, who was expressing confidence that the Sentinels would find some way to deal with the Invid presence on his homeworld, and asking only for a lone Veritech for himself. The Sentinels had already granted him this much, hesitant to tamper with the Perytonian’s delusions of grandeur.

  The one positive discovery of the day had been finding Perytonspace devoid of Invid troop carriers.

  “Surface scans coming in now, Admiral Hunter,” an REF tech announced as the Ark Angel changed course for a look at the planet’s brightside.

  Sensors went to work on the world from a safe distance, and soon had the onboard computers offering up color-enhanced schematics and scrolling data across half-a-dozen monitor screens.

  “Put it up where we can all see it, Mr. Ripp,” Rick ordered. Beside him, Veidt made a sound that read thoughtful in Rick’s mind.

  The scanners showed a weathered world with a ninety-degree axis of rotation, spinning like a top through Umbra’s dying light. Massive continents of polar ice, rounded mountaintops, broad valleys, equatorial grasslands and forest. Background radiation was higher than anyone had been led to expect, and there were innumerable places simply too hot to handle. The devasted remains of cities and population centers leveled during the initial battles of the planet’s priesthood war, its now millennium-old struggle against time. Rick couldn’t help but think of the world the REF had left behind, the Earth after Dolza, cratered and reconfigured like some celestial catastrophe. One look at Jack Baker told him he wasn’t alone with such thoughts.

  “Picking up anomalous readings in quadrant Romeoniner, sir.”

  Rick regarded an angry crimson spot low down on the screen and called for increased magnification. “Can’t make heads or tails of the data,” the science officer announced after a moment. “I think we’re looking at the curse.”

  Rick heard exclamations erupt throughout the room and just managed to stifle his own. The battleground had a diameter of more than one hundred miles; it wasn’t simply some localized timestorm, but a veritable hurricane of savagery, rolling through Peryton’s scant cloud cover, a thundering volcano of unimaginable size. Disturbances of an electromagnetic sort denied the Ark Angel any visuals of the battle.

  “How long before the battle reaches darkside?” Rick asked.

  “Just over three hours, sir,” someone told him. Then by all accounts it would fade away into sunset, only to break out in Umbra’s light elsewhere on the surface.

  “Any way to predict where the thing will erupt?” Rick asked Veidt.

  The Haydonite shook his head. “Its outbreak is tied to Umbra’s light but is otherwise unpredictable, failing to adhere to any laws of causality we have identified.”

  “But then it has to keep to one hemisphere, doesn’t it?”

  “Theoretically, yes. With Peryton’s sixteen-hour period of rotation, one would expect the battle to be in effect confined to two narrow longitudinal and antipodal bands. To rage for eight hours in one band, then disappear and instantly resurface for another eight hours in the opposite band. This, however, is not the case. The battle does indeed disappear with the light; but it can reappear anywhere across Peryton’s brightside face, raging for whatever amount of time is left to it—anywhere from a nanosecond to a full eight hours. In this way it travels the planet.

  “The storm is just as likely to loose itself on the same place it vacated two days before as it is on some new area.”

  Rick felt his head spin. He directed his thoughts to the hive the Invid had constructed over Haydon’s shrine, and requested the computers to show its location relative to the ship. Shortly he learned that the hive was on the darkside presently, some six hou
rs short of morning. That would put the location out of the running for at least that long, and with luck a bit longer—anywhere from a nanosecond to a full eight hours, as Veidt had said.

  “How soon can we make planetfall on the darkside?”

  “Approximately two hours and forty minutes, Admiral.”

  Which left a little over three hours before they had to worry. And all they had to do in the meantime was defeat an Invid garrison of who knew how many strike and skirmish ships.

  Nothing to it, he tried to tell himself in his best command voice. In his mind he heard Veidt berating him for the attempt.

  Two hours of continued deceleration did little to change his mood; but the Ark Angel was at least in orbit now, with Peryton a dark and silent place below them. Rick reasoned he would feel a whole lot better once the invasion was under way, but just as he was about to order the recon teams out, an intermittent burst of subspace transmission trickled its way into the ship’s communications center.

  From the SDF-3.

  Rick and Lisa listened to it from their respective stations in the TIC and on the bridge, regarding each other on intercom screens. The news was incredible: Wolfe was on his way to Earth; Vince Grant on his way to Haydon IV. And T. R. Edwards was on his way to Optera, with the Zentraedi hot on his heels.

  And Minmei in the shotgun seat.

  Lisa saw Rick’s mouth drop open, feared the worst, and got it.

  “It’s not too late,” Rick said to her. “We can come back to Peryton after it’s over. The garrison here will surrender without a fight. No lives will be lost—”