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by Jack McKinney

  “But Rick, we can’t—”

  “We’re not going to,” he said, shaking his head. “But maybe we can take the hin with us.”

  Lisa’s eyes went wide with fear.

  He put a hand on her shoulder. “We’re both going to take a few breaths of Garudan atmosphere.”

  Minmei could sense that the drugs were beginning to wear off. And with that came pain’s slow and steady return. Her body was scratched and bruised—wrists abraded from the cuffs, throat desperately sore from the battle her vocal cords had waged with Edwards’s telepathic prompts. Each and every one of her joints ached; her left eye was swollen closed, two upper teeth knocked loose. Still, pain was better than the soporific effects of the drugs; pain was real and could be dealt with. It was hardly a time for sleep or dreams.

  She was in the former Regent’s private quarters, she knew that much—a complex of oddly shaped rooms with oversize furniture of an ancient design. The bed itself was the size of a flatbed truck; the headboard she was shackled to was a scrollwork affair fashioned from some unidentifiable alloy. Her supine position on the bed made it difficult to take in much more than that.

  She could see, however, that she wasn’t alone. Across the room Edwards’s adjutant was lounging on a kind of throne. Lost in the massive thing, he looked like a little boy in a soldier’s uniform enjoying a moment in his daddy’s easy chair. Minmei couldn’t suppress the small laugh that worked its way out of her, and Benson heard it.

  “Well, our little songbird is awake.”

  Songbird! Minmei thought, recalling the day Khyron had captured her. And Kyle … dear Kyle. “Don’t use that word around me,” she barked at him.

  “Oh?” he said, getting up and walking toward the bed. “Lynn-Minmei’s giving orders all of a sudden?”

  The edge of the bed came well up to Benson’s chest, and he was a pretty ridiculous sight standing there regarding her; but Minmei didn’t like the look she saw in his eyes. “Where’s T.R.?” she asked, straining to glance around the room.

  Benson folded his arms, mulling something over. “He’s down at the Pit, sweetheart—figuring to make monkeys out of some of the Sentinels.”

  “The Sentinels! They’re here?”

  “Easy does it,” he said, putting his hands on her shoulders to restrain her.

  She made the mistake of spitting at him. “Take your hands off me.”

  Benson’s eyes narrowed and his hands began to move down her body. “Who’s going to know, Minmei? Take a look around you: you can scream till your heart’s content.” He leaned over to nuzzle her neck.

  “Edwards will kill you!” she screamed. “Keep away from me!”

  He laughed and climbed up onto the bed, eyes imagining the things he was going to do to her. “Please,” she asked him. “Don’t do this.”

  He began to kiss her. Minmei bit his lips, and let out a small cry as he struck her. He made a grab for her and she twisted away from him. He hit her again and she kicked him—a swift shot that bloodied his nose. And suddenly he wasn’t looking at her with desire anymore; there was murder in his eyes.

  “All right,” she said, letting terror creep into her voice. “I’ll do anything you want. Only take these handcuffs off me. Please.”

  Suspicion surfaced on his face, but Minmei nearly disposed of it with a more throaty appeal.

  Benson uncuffed her.

  She was ready for him now. He came toward her on all fours, a sly grin on his face, and she turned her voice on him—a note that welled up from somewhere so deep inside her it had no name. Benson howled in response, hands to his ears and face screwed up in pain. She knew that she had deafened him, but she sent another note his way just to make sure.

  The sound hit him full-force, threw him completely off the bed. Minmei followed him, sustaining that note, tormenting him with vibrato and modulations. His hand went for his holstered blaster, and she let him have it again. Benson dropped to his knees, wailing his part of the litany.

  They were standing at the threshold of the Regent’s bathroom when he finally worked up the willpower to attack her. He struck while she was catching her breath and slammed her hard against the doorway. Minmei managed a weak arpeggio, but it wasn’t enough to stop him. He smacked her across the face and sent her skidding across the tiled floor on her belly. She felt his weight come down on top of her and shrieked for all it was worth. But Benson was too crazed to be deterred; he was pawing and pummeling her, working himself up to rape or murder or both.

  Minmei put her hands beneath her and shoved as hard as she could. The two of them rolled over together and fell face first into the Regent’s nutrient pool. Minmei surfaced, gasping and treading, Benson swimming toward her, wild eyed and ravenous. She gulped and found her voice, bellowed and drove him back. Benson grabbed his head and submerged. She held her breath and went under to find him, feet atop his shoulders once she did, holding him under while the bubbles of his cries streamed upward. Benson was frantic beneath her, clawing at her feet and legs, but trapped by her weight.

  Minmei sang an aria for the room, her voice echoing from the walls as a green tide sloshed from the pool and spread across the bath and bedroom floors. And finally the struggling subsided. She stroked through the thick fluid and heaved herself up onto the tiles, rasping for breath. The room was quiet, the pool settling itself once more.

  Whimpering, she crawled away, most of the clothing torn from her body, her legs gashed and furrowed by Benson’s fingernails.

  She was almost to the threshold when he erupted from the pool like a sub-launched missile.

  Minmei backed herself to the wall, fear and fascination lodging in her throat: Benson was no longer Human. The nutrient, Minmei’s voice—a combination of the two and death itself had transformed him into a thing evolution would have wanted no part of. There were tentacles and feelers, limbs and appendages, organs and orifices, but nothing she could assemble into any whole, nothing her mind would allow her to see.

  And then, as suddenly as it had appeared, it was gone—annihilated by an energy bolt of blinding light that streaked in from somewhere in the bedroom. Minmei felt herself convulse as gore rained down around her.

  Janice Em stepped into the room, reholstering her blaster. She looked over at Minmei and smiled. “What a team,” she said.

  Rem followed her in and went to Minmei’s side, kneeling to wrap a garment around her quaking shoulders.

  “I—I remember you,” Minmei said.

  “In Tiresia,” he told her. “Years ago.”

  “Where’s Edwards?” Janice asked.

  Minmei looked up at her partner turned warrior. “H-he went to s-somewhere called the P-pit.”

  “Then Rick’s going to run right into him,” Rem said.

  Minmei grabbed hold of him. “Please! We have to save Rick! There’s so much I have to explain!”

  Rem shushed her, comforting her with his hands.

  “But, Rick—”

  “There may be time yet,” Janice announced. She regarded Minmei with a cool look and began to reveal her android face.

  The same atmosphere that kept Kami and Learna in touch with the psychic dimensions of the hin had nearly killed Rick and Lisa on Garuda. But that was after five minutes of forced exposure to the planet’s atmosphere. This time it was different: one minute apiece of controlled inhalations from Learna’s gas tank. Rick’s decision was based on something Cabell had told him on Haydon IV shortly after the devices there had brought everyone around. Five minutes had almost proved a lethal dose; but one minute would permit most humanoid types a fleeting excursion through the hin without permanent side effects.

  They were deep in the hin for a long while, a world of shifting colors and swirling geometric shapes to their awakened pineal eyes, a world of interior landscapes where magic and power defined the horizon. On some biophysical level there was an awareness that they were still inside the Home Hive; but another part of them journeyed outside the confines of gravitation. They sa
iled and soared from one place of power to the next, vigilant and self-possessed, conversant with not only the songs of the hin wind but the voices of the allies. The guides and guardians of that separate reality took multiple forms, sometimes winged ones and sometimes not, but each took care to steer them closer and closer to the Pit and that black spot at the world’s edge that was Edwards himself.

  And try to confuse them he did: in hopes of leading them along paths that led nowhere but down; into pits that plunged straight to Optera’s fiery heart. But the allies were on hand to assist them, and the battles fought were not of rifle and cannon but of vision and will.

  It was all downhill from the birthing chamber: a series of cautious descents through those elevatorless transport shafts, which were something of a central feature in all Invid hives; then a claustrophobic passage through a kind of barracks area crowded with vascular mains, communal nutrient baths, and storage rooms.

  Ultimately, however, Edwards recognized them and bade them enter his domain—a return to the world of flesh and fire his minions overruled.

  Rick and Lisa were phasing in and out of the hin now, cognizant of the allies’ warnings but forced to deal with the threats on a mostly physical plane. They were in a vast underground arena that had been hewn from solid rock, transformed into a spiderweb arrangement of hive cells. And before them was the artificial crater that had worked these changes—a navel of primeval refulgent mist, a gateway to Optera’s mysteries.

  Edwards was standing on the opposite rim of the crater as they approached—a distance of not more than sixty feet. He looked much as he had on the Ark Angel’s bridge screen, save for the studded headband, which he wore at a rakish tilt across the polished face of his skullplate.

  “It’s over,” Rick called, his words returned by the cavern walls. He had the stock of the Wolverine wedged into his right armpit; Lisa held her own weapon at high port. “Call it off and you’ll walk out of here alive.”

  Rick’s voice was confident, buoyed by the allies who were still fluttering overhead; but Edwards only laughed. “I want to congratulate you on making it this far, Mr. and Mrs. Hunter.” The maniacal game-show host here, with a theatrical bow for an invisible audience. “But as they say back home, ‘the fat lady has yet to sing.’ See how you like her.”

  Something emerged from the Pit before either Rick or Lisa could squeeze off a burst. They fell back as the thing began to position itself between them and Edwards. It was an Invid—or had been, Rick decided—now reshaped to look like something out of Wagner by way of Looney Tunes. A fifteen-foot-high prima donna that bore a faint resemblance to Minmei under its horned helmet and reptilian skin. Rick and Lisa opened up on it as it started to sing.

  Arms akimbo, Edwards frowned. “Didn’t like that one, huh? Then try this.”

  The Genesis Pit birthed another re-imagined Special Child—an outsize Invid cherub with an energy bow. It fired while Rick and Lisa were gaping, a white-hot bolt spiking into the ground between them and throwing them apart. Rick came up shooting, holing the creature’s wings, dropping it back into the Pit. But at the same time a small army of smaller beasts loosed by Edwards’s fantasies were stumbling over the rim and headed straight for him. Quadruped fish and insectile birds; zany zoophytes and mammalian monstrosities; Invid mannequins and cigar-store Indians; miscreant Muppets and Seuss lookalikes; an array of reconfigured brutes, beasts, and B-movie beings on parade …

  Rick and Lisa poured everything they had against the things. They were so intent on destroying these manifestations of his illness, for a time they forgot about Edwards himself. The Pit was frothing, hurricaning, determined to keep up with his telepathic commands.

  Their weapons soon depleted, they waded into the parade with knives and rifle butts, Lisa bringing all her Praxian training to bear against the creatures. The things yelped and shrieked as they were stepped upon, crushed, booted into the air, lanced, stabbed, and smashed against the walls of the cavern.

  Rick began to wonder if he was fighting anything at all, or whether this was Edwards’s way of perverting the altered state of the hin. Were they fighting things of their own imagination rather than his? he asked himself as he stepped deeper and deeper into their midst. He reached out for the allies, only to find that they had abandoned him—and who could blame them, really?

  But in their stead were a dozen Ghost Riders. Two of them already had Lisa’s arms pinned behind her; and three more rushed in to drag Rick up from the ground as Edwards approached them, walking the rim with his arms outstretched like an aerial performer. The creatures had vanished into thin air.

  “Now,” he began, contemplating Rick and Lisa and the Genesis Pit itself. “Whatever am I to make of you?”

  Baldan was helping Teal over to one side of the brain chamber when Karen and Jack entered. They stood staring up at the pulsating organ for a moment, then Jack spied the two Spherisians and ran over to them. Karen could see the concern on Baldan’s face; it was apparent that Teal was badly hurt.

  “The weapons are useless,” Baldan warned them before they could loose a shot at the bubble-chamber.

  Jack slipped the location finder off his back and came down beside the injured Spherisian with a helpless look on his face. Behind him, the brain was in a state of agitation, streams of bubbles boiling to the surface of the flasklike tank.

  “Edwards is making too many demands on it,” Teal said weakly. She looked up into her son’s eyes, this being she had shaped with her own hands. “We can do something about it now,” she told him. She could see the puzzlement on all their faces. Baldan told her to save her strength, but she went on. “The brain is sending its power through the hive structure itself, mainly through the floor of the chamber. We can merge with the rock and attempt to shut off the flow.”

  “We would have to meld with the stone,” Baldan said in a rush. “You’d never have enough strength to free yourself.”

  She showed him a wan smile. “I know. It was the same with your father on Praxis. But he showed me a way to a greater loyalty … I understand that now.”

  “Then birth yourself, Teal,” Baldan pleaded. “I will shape your offspring as you shaped me!”

  But Teal could only shake her head. “I am not possessed of sufficient strength to do both, Baldan. We must act quickly.”

  Baldan tried to resist, but Karen shook her head. “You have to try. All of our lives are at stake.”

  Baldan stood up and walked partway around the base of the bubble-chamber. On a nod from Teal he began to slip himself into the rock ground. Teal did the same, Jack and Karen marveling at her absorption into the planetary surface. Her features were visible for a moment, a bas-relief on the floor, then she melded entirely with the rock and disappeared.

  Above them, meanwhile, the brain continued to pulse and throb, transmitting its energy to feed Edwards’s will.

  “The Tracialle reports that the Karbarrans have punched through the hive,” a Human tech on the Valivarre bridge told the Grants, Cabell, and Veidt.

  A cheer went up from the mixed crew of REF personnel, Zentraedi, and Sentinels.

  “The barrier shields are down and the Invid are in full retreat,” the woman continued. “It sounds like chaos down there. The Inorganics are firing at anything in their sights—which happen to be mostly Invid foot soldiers now that the Karbarrans have turned the tide.”

  Vince squeezed his wife’s hand and allowed a brief smile to emerge. “Any word from the Ark Angel?”

  The tech relayed the question and listened for a moment. “Tracialle reports that the ship has sustained serious damage from the hive guns and skirmish ships; but it remains spaceworthy.”

  “And the commando teams?” Jean said.

  “The Praxians and Garudans have been exfiltrated. Learna and Gnea are WIA. Arla-non is dead.”

  Cabell and Jean gasped. Veidt grew silent.

  “The others,” Vince said softly. “Rick, Lisa, Karen …”

  The tech shook her head. “No wo
rd, sir.”

  Jack and Karen saw the brain spasm and nearly throw itself from the open top of the bubble-chamber. A network of pulsating vessels that coursed across the organ’s right hemisphere ruptured, bleeding a sickly colored stain into the tank. The neural vines overhead were moving about like storm-tossed trees, tearing themselves from their purchase on the hive walls and falling to the floor with a cascade of evanescent energy.

  Jack took Karen’s hand and made for the entryway as a tight bundle of fibrous cables collapsed around them.

  The floor was vibrating, cracking open in places, the bubble-chamber tipped like the Leaning Tower.

  “It’s working!” Jack screamed above the noise. “The freakin’ thing’s gonna have a stroke!”

  “Something’s wrong,” Edwards said, fingertips to the headband. “What’s going on?”

  “Shields have failed,” one of his Ghost Riders reported from a commo sphere.

  Rick could see that the sphere image was wavering, derezzing.

  “Looks like we got a bunch of goddamned grizzlies in the hive, General.”

  “Karbarrans,” Edwards muttered. “Get me Benson.”

  The man bent to his task and said, “Can’t raise ’im, sir.”

  Edwards cursed and shot Rick and Lisa a hateful look. “Lieutenant,” he said without turning aside, “it might be best if you and your men readied our shuttle for departure.”

  “What about these two?”

  Edwards grinned and drew his hip howitzer. “We’ll get along famously. Just see to it that you secure us a way out of here.”

  “Will they be coming along, sir?”

  Edwards glanced at the Pit. “No, I don’t think so.”

  Rick and Lisa waited until the last of the Ghosts left before they made their move.

  Edwards appeared to be distracted by something the headband was sending his way; but no sooner did the two Sentinels leap into action when he whirled on them, eager and deadly. Lisa’s foot slapped the Badger aside, but Rick took Edwards’s return kick full-force in the chest and went down breathless, clutching broken tissue and bone. Lisa downhanded Edwards’s torque punch and managed to land a lightning series of blows to the unshielded side of his face, but Edwards stayed on his feet and snapped an elbow to her temple, a lethal front kick to her chin.