Rubicon

by Jack McKinney

  A curse.

  Lisa heard her recent words to Rick; how she had demanded that they finish what they had begun—wipe out the Invid on Peryton before moving against Optera. She had a vision of Carl Riber turning over in his icy Martian grave …

  “Sir, we’ve got movement out here,” one of the Battloid pilots called in from the perimeter.

  “Get a direction,” Rick said over the command freq.

  “Trying, sir … Jesus! They’re right beneath us, sir! They’ve breached the perimeter. They—”

  Lisa heard an explosive roar behind her, simultaneous with a death shriek that pierced the net. Reflexively, she brought her hands to the sides of her helmet, turning in time to see two brilliant flashes ignite a shrubby area deep in the forest.

  “Return to your mecha!” Rick shouted.

  “Movement at point Charlie,” another pilot updated.

  “Ditto that at Tango-niner, command,” a voice echoed.

  Lisa rushed down the rise toward her idling VT, Bela and one of the Perytonias two steps behind. The mecha was in Guardian mode, wings spread and radome tipped to the ground like a rapacious bird. A series of ear-splitting detonations in the woods was followed by a wave of concussive heat that almost stopped her in her tracks.

  Rick was quick, up and in before she had even reached her ship. “Move it, move it!” she heard him shout as the Veritech’s canopy lowered.

  More explosions, off to the left now; annihilation disks mixing it up with rifle/cannon bursts, the VT pilots’ stammering response.

  Lisa had her hands and feet in the fuselage notches when the first Shock Trooper showed itself, emerging out of the soft ground like some crazed land crab, its shoulder-mounted cannons primed for fire. The first Frisbee storm took the tail off Karen and Jack’s mecha; Lisa saw the two of them hurl themselves from the spinning ship just short of a follow-up blast that blew the thing to bits. Two, three, four more Invid were springing up, ladybug carapaces and pincer arms shedding dirt as they rose.

  Lisa had one of them bracketed in her sights, and fired even before she dropped the canopy. Twin missiles raced from the forward tubes and caught the enemy ship dead center, gobs of molten alloy and green nutrient launched through a fountain of blinding fire spattering against the nose of the VT.

  “Bring ’em upright!” Rick ordered.

  Already separated, the Alpha and Beta components of his ship began to reconfigure.

  Elsewhere, Lron’s mecha sustained a crippling shock. Gnea—an arm around Karen Penn—along with Baldan and two more Perytonians were cut off from their VT and making for the woods. Baker was on the ground, unconscious or dead. Lisa reversed the canopy, disengaged the seat harness, and went out for him.

  She hit the ground in a crouch and broke into a jagged run, anni disks overhead, rasping like angry buzzsaws. To her right, an Invid that was thrashing its way through the trees came apart in a fiery spectacle; another Trooper dropped in front of her, both legs blown away. Rick was shouting at her, his Battloid down on one knee, its chain-gun raised.

  Jack had come to by the time she reached his side.

  “Goddamn crab-eyed Flower-eating freakoid … Where’s Karen?”

  “Gnea’s got her. She’s safe.” A barrage of diskfire topped a line of trees behind them. “Safe as any of us, anyway.”

  “I owe you one, Commander,” Jack said as she was helping him to his feet.

  “Who’s counting.”

  Lisa chinned into the command net to hear Rick ordering an assist from Ark Angel. But the ship was having problems of its own; it had just gone to guns with an Invid troop carrier that matched the ID signature of the vessel Tesla had commandeered on Spheris. The carrier had yawned a mess of Pincer Ships into local space and most of the Ark Angel’s VT squadrons had already been committed to engage them.

  Lisa was about to break into the channel when a sudden wave of frigid air assaulted her clear through the jumpsuit. Then her eyes began to play tricks on her, shadowy forms winking in and out of sight, like ships trapped in a spacefold irregularity. The air shimmered and danced, and the waiting VT seemed no more than a mirage.

  “… I think I musta taken a whack on the head,” Jack was saying.

  The firefight, meanwhile, had come to an abrupt halt. Battloids and Shock Troopers were gaping at one another, weapons at rest, heads searching the devastated surroundings for clues.

  “Rick,” Lisa said uncertainly into the helmet pickup. At the same time she put the chronometer on display in the faceshield.

  The curse was waking up to a new day.

  Inside the Peryton hive, the shrill whistling of Invid alarms brought Janice, Burak, and Rem to a similar stand still.

  “We’ve been found out!” Burak cried, struggling against the hold Janice had clamped on his robes. Her projected disguise had gotten them past the perimeter sentries and through the hive’s permeable main gate. They were deep within its labyrinthine core now, just a scientist and his two Perytonian specimens on their way to the labs.

  “Keep still,” Rem said out of the corner of his mouth. Janice the Invid had a solid handful of his cowl. “You don’t see them coming after us, do you?”

  It was true. Things had been somewhat less than ordered from the outset—a certain amount of packing up taking place: scouts and gatherers hurrying in to offload batches of recently harvested Flowers and Fruit; workers emptying vats of processed nutrient into outsize canisters and tanker mecha; scientists and armored lieutenants relaying commands in that hollow-sounding synthesized voice of theirs. A ways back the masquerading trio had passed by the chamber that housed the hive’s overworked brain, and Janice was able to learn that the Regent had ordered everyone to close up shop. A troopship would be on its way to Peryton as soon as he could spare one; but in the meantime, the hive personnel were to make certain that all existing supplies were packaged for transport.

  The alarms, however, had thrown the soldiers and techs into a positive frenzy of activity, but none of that was aimed in the Sentinels’ direction. Janice let go of Rem and put a hand out to stop a soldier who was rushing by. For the sake of appearances, she struck a characteristic pose, false hands tucked into the sleeves of her equally false white robe.

  “What’s all this about, drone? Why are the alarms sounding?”

  The soldier’s snout twitched back and forth, mirroring some internal confusion. Desperately, the creature sought to answer to the demands of both the brain and this one of rank who had singled it out.

  “The planet’s curse, Exalted One.”

  “Here?!” Burak said before Janice could stop him. There was no record of an outbreak having taken place in the vicinity of the shrine, even though the original battle in which the Macassar had lost his sons had been fought nearby. The closest outbreak had come some three hundred years ago, and almost as many miles away.

  “This one understands our language,” Janice told the soldier, thrusting Burak forward for the creature’s inspection.

  Its suspicions laid to rest, the soldier bowed its tubular snout. “The battle rages in the heart of the city. The hive is threatened.”

  Janice waved a hand, dismissively. “Then go about your duty, drone.”

  The soldier moved off to join in the corridor confusion.

  “We have no time to waste,” Janice said, doubling their pace. “The battle will replay itself in full. It will spill into the hive and close on the shrine as it did that first day.”

  Burak dragged his heels and managed to shrug off Janice’s grip. Horns lowered, he shoved his demon’s face close to the android’s mask. “You haven’t told me what I am to do, Wyrdling,” he seethed.

  Janice took a step back, dissolving the disguise. “You’ll know when the time comes,” she told him.

  In minutes the shrine itself came into view—what was left of it, at least: the lower portion of what had once been a thousand-foot-tall statue, carved from a volcanic tor in the likeness of Haydon the Great. The Invid had constru
cted their conical hive atop the cliffs that surrounded the shrine, as a series of interconnected circular corridors, concentric to the statue’s base, with access to it limited to a single gate in the hive’s innermost corridor band.

  Rem was gazing up at the ruined work, the intricate designs of the figure’s stone robes, when Janice said, “Down there,” pointing to the circular base some fifty feet below them. “That’s where we’ll find the Haydon’s generator.”

  Burak and Rem followed her down a narrow stairway hewn into the side of the cliff. Light spilled from the generator the Perytons’ ancient priests and craftsmen had concealed within the shrine; it pulsed and strobed as intensely as starlight from small windows set into the base, as though a great turbine was spinning there, driven perhaps by heat from the planetary core itself. Over the centuries the light had rarified the air and etched shadows into the surrounding cliff, and yet Burak and Rem both found that they could stare into the heart of it.

  For the danger here was not of the physical sort.

  It was like a supercollider of old, an atom smasher, outfitted with miles of electromagnetic tunnels, conduits, shields, and apparatus more befitting an alchemist’s workshop than a scientist’s lab. In the center of the ring, attacked from all points by a storm of unleashed lightning, was a transparent sphere one hundred feet in diameter. And flashing in and out of sight in the center of that sphere was the twisted twin-horned aged face of the Macassar himself—the way he had viewed himself, at any rate—looking every bit as frightening and portentious as Oz’s wizard at his malevolent best.

  “I’m having second thoughts,” Burak stammered to his companions while they dragged him forward toward the psicon generator’s portal. “We should reconsider—”

  Janice took him by the front of his robe. “You wanted to save your world.”

  “I do, Wyrdling, but—”

  “Then follow me. The moment approaches.”

  Five thousand miles above Peryton in a small arc of space the planet claimed as its own, a cloud of short-lived explosions erupted in the night. Armored Veritechs and Invid Pincer Ships in a deadly null-g ballet, the two warships that launched them like deep-sea leviathans on the prowl. Tesla had been lucky to escape with his life. But thanks to the diversion, he was surface-bound now, in a tentacled shuttlecraft that resembled a spiny starfish. The craft’s navigational systems were tied into the living computer of the hive—which displays showed to be three Periods into daylight. These same displays were registering readings of an extraordinary sort from the hive itself, but they were nothing Tesla could make sense of.

  As he approached, however, his eyes showed him what his intellect had been unable to grasp. There was a riot in progress; more than a riot: a veritable revolt. The city that had grown up around the conical hive was a battle zone, its perpetual shroud darker and angrier than normal, its maze of eroded byways filled with crazed movement. But Tesla was perplexed when he began to search the skies for Shock Troopers or Enforcers.

  Then he thought that he glimpsed the truth, realizing that it was Perytonian against Perytonian down there. And he ventured, Not a revolt but a revolution. And a timely one at that.

  Tesla grinned inwardly. Let them struggle while Tesla dined on the Fruits their world had provided. The Fruits that would liberate him. Tesla the Unconquerable, Tesla the Infamous!

  The shuttle set down at the base of the hive in the normally fortified perimeter zone, which Tesla was distressed to find utterly devoid of troops. The warring inhabitants of the planet were dangerously close, stray rounds and energy beams from their mishmash of weaponry actually penetrating the hive in places. And what a savage bunch they were! Red against black, so it appeared; but who could be sure, given the riotous variety of uniforms and armaments? Tesla gazed around in stunned silence. Directly in front of him, a group of soldiers were bringing some kind of plasma weapon to bear on an unseen target, while all but adjacent to their position, two rival bands of naked Perytonians were goring one another to death with their horns! Elsewhere, civilians—women with babes in their arms, wide-eyed youths, and feeble old derelicts—ran shrieking through the chaos. Fire, smoke, and clamor poured into the sky.

  Tesla tore himself from the scene and made a dash for the hive, the battle pressing in on him. Yet why did it seem that at least half those warriors and innocents he had glimpsed were already dead? It only struck him now: there were limbless beings out there. Headless ones!

  The interior of the hive reflected the chaos outside; but none of the Invid were too wrapped up in their brain-fed tasks not to fall on their faces at the sight of Tesla. Tesla the Evolved, standing as proud and tall and humanoid as the Regess herself.

  He stooped down to pick two groveling soldiers from the floor. “Fruits,” he snarled, lifting them up to his face. “Where are they being stored?”

  One of them pointed a trembling four-fingered hand toward the center of the hive. “But most of them have already been processed—”

  Tesla issued a growl of impatience and tossed the creatures aside. His senses alone would lead him to the Fruit.

  But no sooner did he set off when a screaming hiss erased an entire portion of hive wall behind him. A second burst and the wall to his left disintegrated. And within moments, Perytonians were pouring through the wounds.

  Tesla’s panicked cry lodged in his throat; but his legs suddenly had a mind of their own. He ran unashamedly for the heart of the hive.

  CHAPTER

  SIX

  I recalled my words to Lang shortly after the battle for Tiresia: Put aside your sympathy … They are not the race they once were; they are homeless now, and driven. They will stop at nothing to regain their precious Flowers, and if that matrix exists—they will find it. Defeat them here, I had argued. Exterminate them before you face the Masters … But that was before I had a full understanding of the injustices and cruel ironies that had brought them to their degraded state. Karbarra, Praxis, and Haydon IV had taught me more than a few lessons, chief among which was that age is certainly no guarantee of wisdom.

  Cabell, A Pedagogue Abroad:

  Notes on the Sentinels Campaign

  Minmei couldn’t remember her lines. Even the scene itself didn’t seem familiar. Where was the director? Where, for that matter, was Kyle?

  The actors portraying Earth soldiers threw her down on a kind of carpet in front of the puppet’s massive throne, where one of them shackled her wrists together around the base of a pedestaled sphere that resembled an outsize grain of pollen. Rougher than necessary, Minmei thought, glaring at the man in the jumpsuit. Bad enough all this gratuitous violence, but to have to put up with method-acting extras besides … Well, someone was going to hear about it.

  But for the time being she would play her part. She struggled against her bonds, adopted a hopeless look for the cameras, and hung her head in defeat, whimpering. Her clothes were soiled and strategically tattered—a lot of upper thigh and midriff exposed—and the makeup people had done one heck of a job in simulating cuts and bruises. But the real credit for today’s shoot, she decided, had to go to special effects. What a set it was—a fantastical creation!

  The puppet had to be at least fifteen feet tall. It had arms and legs of a sort, but its head looked like something you would find in a sideshow at Seaworld. A snail’s face with black, snakelike eyes and twin sensor antennae; a bulging trunk of a neck, with slits like gills and a front-to-rear ridge of eyeball organs. Two huge robotic cats sat on either side of it, horned and snarling. And beyond, what she first took to be a giant old fashioned lava lamp; but was in fact an ugly mass of brain, floated in a bubble-filled vessel. Real enough to frighten young kids, Minmei ventured; have to go for a parental-guidance rating. And throughout the sound stage were costumes and accessories to rival any she had seen. Ranks of seven-foot-tall, battle armored warriors, columns of pincer-armed mecha, squads of evil-looking soldiers with assault rifles and riot guns. And the moviegoing public thought Little White Dragon had
been something. Wait until they got an eyeful of this one!

  Someone laughed, and Minmei opened her eyes. A blond-haired actor was standing over her. He wore jackboots and a short cape, and half his face was hidden behind a gleaming skullplate. She knew him from somewhere, but couldn’t recall just which picture it was they had worked on together.

  “Our star seems to be a bit under the weather,” the man was saying. The villain, obviously. “Perhaps we went overboard on the drugs.” He bent over to grab her chin in his strong hand. “Get something to snap her out of it.”

  Minmei twisted free of his hand to spit at him. “Let me go!” she screamed, tugging at the shackles for all it was worth. Surely it was about time for Kyle to make his entrance. Where was he, anyway?

  A minute later a second soldier stepped in to join the blond man. He carried a pneumatic syringe gun and an ampule of colorless liquid. Behind them, the puppet on the throne was bobbing its head through a series of very lifelike motions. In a heart-rattling basso voice, it uttered a few incomprehensible phrases. Subtitles, Minmei told herself, disappointed. How could they expect five-year-olds to read? The cinemas would be full of chattering adults, explaining everything to their kids.

  “Please, not that! No, please!” Minmei begged, withdrawing from the syringe as far as the alloy cuffs allowed.

  “Hold her still!” the blond actor barked, roughly grabbing her arm.

  She was shocked to feel an actual twinge of pain as the soldier held the gun to her flesh. The producers must have smelled awards in the air or something.

  Everything grew hazy for a moment, and Minmei was almost tempted to stop the shoot; but she was a trooper and simply squeezed her eyes shut, concealing her discomfort and waiting for the dizziness to pass.

  The real world rushed in on her like a runaway train.

  Unfamiliar sounds and odors assaulted her senses. The Regent moved his head forward in an obscene gesture to sniff at her, Edwards and his cruel aide-de-camp, Benson, grinning down at her with smug, self-satisfied looks. Invid soldiers babbled, Ghost riders applauded … and through it all there was pain. Pain from her chafed and bleeding wrists; pain from the purple bruises on her legs. And pain that had no visible counterpart—the torment and grief bottled up inside her.