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by Jack McKinney

  Companies of confused Scrim, Crann, Odeon, and armored foot soldiers had fallen back to defend vulnerable places in the hives and slave-domes; but the Karbarrans were not to be denied their day of vengeance. The barrier shield would fall and the Home Hive would be theirs. The Invid would be contained at last and returned to the pits that had given them life.

  The fireball emerged from a sphere of white-hot silence; it expanded, billowing and roiling like some nefarious cloud, the Tokugawa’s final moment.

  Jean Grant averted her eyes from the harshness of the light, the harshness of that moment. The others on the Micronian balcony of the Valivarre bridge did the same, save for the Zentraedi commander, who seemed to find some fascination there. She had been Breetai’s woman, this Kazianna Hesh, Jean understood; but who could tell what the female goliath was reading in those short-lived flames? The like fires that had claimed her warrior’s heart perhaps; the heat death that would one day claim them all.

  Vince was behind her, grim, closed in on himself. An implosion, a silence Jean knew could do more harm than good. She had not seen him quite like this since the GMU’s fiery demise. Let it go, she wanted to tell him. He had so wanted the peace proposal to be embraced; to see an end to this continuing madness. The devils hand, he had said to her. On either side of him were Veidt and Cabell, neither of whom she could read.

  The Valivarre had come to their rescue, gathered the shuttles and escape pods together into her enormous belly, and sped them all to safe distance, Edwards’s SDF-7 and the Tokugawa already a memory. One remaining Invid troopship was out there somewhere—that scintillating mote in Optera’s shadow?—but it had been crippled, reportedly, by a joint assault group of Battlepods and Skull Squadron Veritechs.

  By the time Jean returned her eyes to the forward screen, the Tokugawa’s fireball had spent itself; but local space was as warm with glowing pieces of debris, flaming out as she watched. The husk of an Invid craft drifted into view, turning lazily toward the Valivarre’s bow, and Jean saw Claudia Grant’s face.

  She heard Vince gasp.

  The transmogrified Pincer Ship was soon falling toward darkside, but its brief transit had loosed a vision in Jean’s mind—a glimpse of horrors yet to come, no matter what the outcome of this day. It was Earth, not Optera, she seemed to be gazing on now, and the Invid were there. Housed in a hive complex very much like the one below, a fleet of warships sent against it. But from Earth’s surface a tower of radiant fire would arise—a shaft of mindstuff and alchemical quintessence that would reconfigure itself as it climbed. And it Would take the shape of a celestial phoenix on the wing, huge and brilliant to behold.

  And she saw it was the peace they sought. A peace beyond understanding; a comingling of things she could not identify, save two whose names were life and death.

  “You said you wanted two Human subjects for the Pit, General,” the Ghost Rider said to Edwards’s distorted image in the center of the instrumentality sphere. “We got ’em right here.”

  “Show me,” Jack heard Edwards order the soldier. Then someone shoved him and Karen forward toward the device’s unseen visual pickups.

  “Well,” Edwards said, grinning. He leaned forward, face and features fisheyed. “Ensign … Baker, isn’t it? And Harry Penn’s firebrand. Karen, if I remember correctly.” Edwards laughed. “Funny, you two ending up here.”

  “We could say the same thing, Edwards,” Jack told him, getting a Wolverine muzzle in the ribs for his tone. Edwards told his minion to back off.

  “We don’t want to damage the goods, Sergeant.”

  Jack cursed under his breath.

  Karen had followed him into that black triangle his hands had unluckily opened in the endwall of the cul-de-sac. An Invid scientist had dragged Jack in—down, actually, to some underground level of the hive. Five of Edwards’s Ghost Riders had pointed weapons at him. And the next thing Jack knew, Karen was next to him, trying to fight off the two soldiers who had a hold of her, survival knife in one hand, Badger in the other.

  “When am I going to learn?” she had said to him.

  Yeah, well who invited you?… Is what he should have said. Instead of apologizing.

  Fortunately, Baldan and Teal had had sense enough not to follow her.

  “Take them to the Pit,” Edwards was saying from the sphere. “I’ll meet you there.”

  Edwards swung away from the pickup to glance behind him, and Jack got a good look at the room itself—a kind of classical interior, like the Greco-Romanesque rooms in Tiresia. Edwards’s adjutant, Benson, was sitting in an outsize chair, teasing a Hellcat with a length of plasticized cord. But it was the strangely contoured bed that caught Jack’s attention. Cuffed to what Jack supposed might be a headboard was Minmei. A hard-times Minmei at that.

  Karen whispered, “Sure doesn’t look like she’s enjoying the honeymoon, does it?”

  Jack risked a look over his shoulder. “You know how young brides can be,” he started to say, but Karen shushed him.

  “I’ve a few things to take care of first,” Edwards told his lieutenant. “But stay on your toes. Apparently they aren’t the only ones who have gotten into the hive. I’m sending some reinforcements to rendezvous with you.”

  The Ghost Rider saluted. “Any idea what you’re going to make ’em into, sir?”

  Edwards assumed a contemplative look. “Well, I’m not sure yet, Sergeant. I was thinking centaurs. But maybe I’ll just try for a beast with two backs.”

  Kami waved Learna and Gnea forward into a corridor brighter than the rest, a primary of some sort, he guessed. There were dozens of commo spheres here, instrumentality junctions every few feet. Sendings from an ally up ahead in the hive’s central chamber alerted him to danger. His remote eyes beheld shafts of vertical green light, Tzuptum’s radiance captured by prismatic panels in the hive’s roof, lured down into the chamber for a purpose he could not fathom.

  Bela had remained behind to watch over her mother’s body. Arla-non was beyond help by the time the Sentinels had reached her—Edwards’s soldiers were dead—but Bela had insisted on staying with her, some secret Sisterhood ritual left to perform. Kami and Learna could see the change in Gnea’s etheric body as well: violet swirls around her heart, a rain of lusterless crystal shapes throughout the whole of the aura.

  The three were soon edging into the central chamber; Learna was the first to spy Edwards’s Ghosts. There were five of them, moving at double-time through a room that could have been the chamber of a primate heart. Jack and Karen were pressed among them.

  Without warning, Gnea dropped the lead Ghost; and before either of the Garudans had time to react, she had put an arrow through the upper leg of a second. The rest of the group turned and opened fire. Kami and Learna dove for cover, Badgers raised but held in check for fear of catching Jack and Karen in the crossfire. Gnea, however, seemed to have no such concerns; she hadn’t even bothered to conceal herself, and was still brazening it out from the mouth of the corridor, launching arrows and Praxian imprecations into the room.

  Jack and Karen, meanwhile, had thrown themselves to the floor. One of Edwards’s men was about to turn his Wolverine on them, but Jack managed to roll the soldier’s legs out from under him and wrestle the weapon from his grip. Karen shortly had another of them in a choke hold.

  Kami saw Gnea go down—stitched shoulder to crotch by the only soldier still on his feet. Learna was leaping for the Human even now, and the allies had begun to keen. Kami swung around in time to see half-a-dozen Invid soldiers burst into the chamber, their forearm cannons primed for fire. He sent a warning to Learna and rushed forward, energy packets searing into the wall behind him. Both Baker and Perm had Wolverines now, and their unified fire cut one of the Invid in half, a stray shot from the soldier’s cannon exploding in the enemy’s midst. In the middle of it all, Learna and the Human were going hand-to-hand. Kami tightened his grasp on his knife and lunged. At the same time, he heard Rick Hunter’s voice find him from across the room.
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  They took a quick body count when the smoke cleared.

  All seven Invid were dead, three of them literally blown to pieces. Two from Edwards’s squad had bought it; two more were seriously wounded. Gnea was alive, thanks to the padding of her armor, but she was going to need urgent attention. Kami volunteered to go back for Bela and see to it that Arla-non and Gnea were extracted. Jack and Karen updated Rick on their capture and short chat with Edwards.

  “You’re certain it was Minmei?” Rick asked when they had finished.

  Baker nodded. “And she didn’t look too thrilled to be there, either. Edwards is holding her prisoner.”

  “I knew it!” Rick said. “Everybody’s been misreading her all along. She’d never get mixed up with someone like Edwards.” He saw that Lisa was watching him. “What about Baldan and Teal?”

  Karen spoke to that. “As far as we know, they’re still headed for the brain.”

  Rick glanced at everyone. “All right, listen up. Lisa and I will continue on with Learna. Maybe we can beat Edwards to the Genesis Pit and surprise him there. Janice and Rem can go after Minmei.” He shot Lisa a quick sidelong look, then turned to Jack and Karen. “We’ll assume the Spherisians are still on track. You two see if you can catch up with them.”

  Jack was about to ask just how they were supposed to accomplish that—since Baldan and Teal had been the team’s eyes and ears—when Rem shrugged out of the direction-finder backpack and handed it over to him.

  “But how you gonna find Minmei?” Jack asked.

  The Tiresian showed him an arrogant look. “I’m beginning to learn my way around,” Rem said, eyes on Janice now. “You might even say I’ve been here before.”

  CHAPTER

  TWELVE

  In a sense, the hives, the living computers, the Invid themselves were all made of the same stuff—even to some extent the chitinous armor of the Shock Troopers, Pincer Ships, and the rest. It could be said (and indeed it has) that the Invid were in reality the most mature form of the Flower of Life. The Flowers had been denied the right to procreate, and because of this the Invid were to become their agents of retribution.

  Dr. Emil Lang, The New Testament

  “He’s dead,” Teal said, standing up.

  Baldan stared at the Human. The blood, the burned flesh, and ghastly smell sent a powerful wave of remorse through him. Ghost Rider or not, the being was still one of Hunter’s own planetary brothers. First the Invid and now this, he thought. What was it in the Humans’ makeup that made it so easy for them to kill one another? Better still, what was lacking in their evolution as a species that permitted them to kill one another? He used the memories of his namesake to recall a time when his own life-form had faced the challenge and conquered their primitive lusts. Even when the Masters came, the planetary consciousness would not allow for warfare or rebellion. And the same with the Invid. But how correct it now seemed to go along with the Humans’ campaign; how simple and straightforward a thing it had become to murder in the name of liberation.

  “Baldan?” Teal said, a note of concern in her voice.

  He shook himself from the sight and looked at her in an uncertain way. Why had this one set him thinking? he wondered. A long trail of death stretched halfway across the Quadrant now.

  Four Humans and twice that number of Invid soldiers had fallen to the Spherisians’ weapons since the cul-de-sac. They had searched for Jack and Karen, but decided ultimately to follow through with the mission. For Baldan, who felt a love for Karen he would never be able to express, let alone grasp, the decision had demonstrated just how warriorlike he had become—this tactical reasoning: the weighing of two lives lost against the many the success of their mission would save. That this should have been the world he showed Karen in the fenestella!

  His progenitor, Baldan I, had been caught up in the war; but in a very real sense Baldan II had been born into the war. Born and shaped by it, a Spherisian unlike the rest, savior or fiend.

  “Come,” Teal ordered him. “We have arrived.”

  He nodded and followed her, trusting himself to her instincts, but equally sure of the vibrations his own read in the quivering floor of the hive. The brain was nearby, as close as the room ahead of them …

  But neither of them was prepared for what they faced a moment later.

  The two were no strangers to these living computers, and like the other Sentinels they had had direct dealings with the things on half-a-dozen worlds. Those, however, had been mere sections of this one—titanic and awe-inspiring in its stories-high bubble-chamber. This was the one that commanded them all, the one that gave shape to the entire Invid network; and Baldan and Teal were quick to realize that Edwards and his army would be powerless without it.

  The room itself was scarcely large enough to contain the brain, and most of it—organic-seeming walls, floor, and ceiling—had recently become incorporated into the brain’s physical structure. On the death of the Regent, Baldan surmised.

  Tentacular bundles of neural fibers had sprouted from the organ itself, and these trailed to the floor like rain forest vines and creepers, transforming every place they touched to amorphous clusters of animate tissue. The room pulsed with a kind of self-generated cerebral energy that danced across the convoluted surface of the brain like St. Elmo’s fire and erupted from the mouth of the bubble-chamber to wash the walls with febrile light. Sounds hung like mist in the thick, electric air, quivering into audible frequencies as the Spherisians moved into the room.

  The brain seemed aware of their presence, but somehow unconcerned. It was as though the Sentinels’ coordinated strikes against the hive had so taxed its outpourings that it could scarcely accommodate some new and even more immediate intrusion.

  Which is precisely the way Baldan and Teal preferred it. They had their weapons raised, aimed up at the bubble-chamber now.

  “The underside,” Teal suggested, gesturing to a bulbous, pituitarylike projection affixed to the brain’s ventral surface.

  Baldan upped the blast intensity of his rifle until it maxed out. “On my count,” he told her.

  And on three they fired—or tried to, at any rate.

  They made a second attempt, but again the weapons failed. And before they could begin to puzzle it out, two sinuous tendrils of electrical anger had shot from the bubble-chamber to engulf them. The brain’s defenses flailed at them, tearing the rifles from their hold and whipping Teal across the room with the force of its charge.

  Rick thought it was the most horrible place the war had yet taken them. A columbarium, or hatchery of some sort, dark and reeking of decay, putrefaction and gangrene—a birthing center for monsters. Everywhere they looked, the remains of fibrous eggsacs and gelatinous afterbirth; lumps of organic stuff that had failed to take form—a trash heap of Invid parts, of hands and snouts and ophidian eyes. And there were mecha as well: row upon row of Shock Troopers and Pincer Ships, cockpits waiting to be filled with nutrient fluid and stuffed with pilots; cannons and anni-disk launchers ready for the infusion of Protoculture that would bring them to evil life.

  Learna held the point, some Garudan ally directing her steps to the location of the Pit. To Edwards, Rick told himself, eager for the confrontation. Lisa was a few steps behind, and he opened the net to whisper to her.

  “This is about the worst, the way I figure it.”

  “Not the worst, Rick,” she said with a mournful sigh. “The saddest.”

  “I don’t get you.”

  She stopped walking as he swung around to face her. “Can’t you feel it? This is where she must have tried to birth her army—the one the Regent demanded of her.”

  “The Regess, you mean.”

  He saw her nod, and began to glance around him, more uncomfortable now than before. The saddest. A woman’s intuition. Was this, then, how a nursery would look to the Invid Queen-Mother? he wondered.

  A sudden flash behind him erased the thought, a follow-up explosion flattening him against the floor. He saw Lisa’s
legs when he opened his eyes; she was standing over him, the Wolverine coughing fire at something out of view. He tried to scramble up, but she fell over him, pinning him down. Simultaneously came a second blast, and a quick wash of heat.

  Then all at once Lisa was up and running. Rick could see the crippled Invid ship, a Shock Trooper collapsed forward onto its pincer arms, nutrient running like green sap from its holed sensor.

  Learna had been hit before Lisa’s shot had taken the thing out.

  “How bad is it?” Rick asked, coming over to the two of them, helmet faceshield raised. Lisa had pulled Learna’s shirt up, slapped a pressure bandage high up on her furless belly.

  “She’ll live.”

  Learna’s breathing was labored beneath the transpirator mask. “Can you make it back?” he asked her.

  She told him she could. “But you can’t go on without me.”

  Rick showed her a forced smile. “The Pit can’t be much farther. We’ll find it. Important thing is to get you back—”

  “It’s not that,” she interrupted him. “It’s Edwards.”

  Lisa put her hand behind Learna’s neck and helped her to sit up. “What about Edwards, Learna?”

  “His power … the Invid brain has given him power. He’ll use it to confuse your thoughts.”

  Rick and Lisa traded looks. “We’ll just have to take that chance.”

  “No!” Learna said, taking hold of his shirtfront. “You need me with you. The hin will protect us.”

  “You’re in no condition—” Lisa started to say.

  “You need me with you!”

  Rick held Learna’s gaze for a long moment, those fox eyes above the rim of the transpirator mask. “She’s right, Lisa. Our weapons aren’t any match for him now.”