Dark Powers

by Jack McKinney

  Breetai stretched again, feeling energized and exultant, rather than tired, by Fantoma’s pull.

  It was the oddest thing, but—memories seemed to be coming back to Breetai. The first dropship landing had been centered on an open-pit area, and it seemed to Breetai that he recognized the landscape around him. Something drew him up a slope—twenty degrees, he estimated; a steep climb—until he reached the summit.

  There was a bench there, a mere trestle of stone slabs, but how had he known he would find it at just that spot? Conversations from his past, or perhaps hallucinations, drifted in and out of his thoughts. He suddenly felt an impotent fury at having been deprived of his own past—at being unable to trust his own memory.

  In that moment, an image of himself and Exedore came to him, sitting on the bench side by side, and Exedore saying something that Breetai was having trouble following.

  I remember! The words were a thunderous rumbling in his chest.

  “No; of course we won’t remember this life, my friend,” Exedore was saying, “but the Robotech Masters plan momentous things for us. We will become much like a force of nature—something that will sweep the galaxy—the universe—in glory and triumph!”

  Breetai saw himself stop and ponder that; he was only a miner—though he was, aside from Dolza, the biggest and strongest Zentraedi ever created, the most durable and formidable of them all—and had difficulty understanding the interstellar jihad that Exedore was painting in words.

  Now he recalled the peculiar stirrings in him when he had heard Exedore’s exhortation. The thought of a life of battle and triumph had made him feel exalted. And he had had a preternaturally long lifetime of it, just as Exedore foresaw.

  But where could these recollections be coming from? Surely the Masters had expunged all true memories. Breetai shook his head within the huge helmet, mystified and troubled.

  “Lord Breetai?” He turned in surprise, both at the fact that someone was standing there, and at the realization that it was a Zentraedi female. “The construction gang is about to begin work on permanent housing,” she said, “but they’d like you to make final approval of the site.”

  She was wearing Quadrano powered armor that had been retrofitted for labor and mining duty, he could see. One of Miriya Parina’s spitfires, no doubt; Breetai had heard that the Quadranos had never quite forgiven their leader for undergoing Micronization, marrying Max Sterling, and having his child. Many of them had deserted to follow the mad Khyron and his, his lover, Azonia, but some had remained loyal to Breetai, and a few of those had survived the final battle against Dolza and the Malcontent Uprisings and the battle with the Inorganics.

  Breetai looked at her uneasily. The Zentraedi had always been rigidly segregated by sex, and most of them found the thought of fraternization disquieting to the point where it had been known to make them physically ill. But the unusual circumstances here in the primitive Fantoman start-up effort had made it impossible to preserve the old ways altogether.

  Breetai forced himself to look her over. Not easy to tell much about her in the bulky powered armor except that she was tall for a female, well over fifty feet. Through her tinted facebowl, he could see that she had prominent cheekbones and slightly oblique eyes, looking rather like what Lang or Hunter would call Slavic, and her purple hair was cropped masculinely short. But there was something else about her face …

  He realized, stunned, that she was wearing cosmetics. The thought passed through him. Great suns! Where did she get them? Surely a female of our race uses as much in one application as an Earth woman uses in a month!

  She had accentuated the fullness of her mouth, the length of her glittering lashes, the line of her long-arched brows. Breetai stared at her, openmouthed, as she saluted and began to about-face.

  “Wait!” he said on sudden impulse. “What’s your name?”

  She turned back to him. “I am Kazianna Hesh, formerly of the Quadranos, my lord.” She gave a slight smile, thumping the plastron of her armor with a gauntleted fist. “And now a Quadrano again, it seems. Some of our battle suits have been in storage all this time, and the hour is come when they’re needed again.”

  “So it is.” Breetai inspected Kazianna Hesh, not sure why he was doing so. It was one thing to interact with human females like Lisa Hayes, knowing there was no possibility of … of relations with them, at least not as far as he was concerned. It was quite another, and very unsettling, to have the smiling, rather alluring-looking Quadrano staring at him so boldly.

  “And, if I may say so, sir, what with all the perils that Fantoma harbors, it is good to be serving in a danger zone under the command of my Lord Breetai once more.”

  She saluted again, precisely, but still with that odd half smile. Breetai responded, and Kazianna did a careful high-g march back down the little hillock. Breetai watched her go, studying her walk, wondering whether it was something about her armor—a malfunction, perhaps?—that put that nonregulation sway in her gait.

  * * *

  “I don’t care what your platoon leader told you,” General T. R. Edwards roared into the face of the cleanup-detail sergeant. “I’m telling you to stack those things in the catacombs for further study by my evaluation teams! And make goddamn sure you don’t damage any!”

  The sergeant chose the better part of valor, saluting Edwards, then shrugging to his men and reorganizing them. They had been using their powered equipment to move the inert forms of the Invid Inorganic fighting mecha up out of the catacombs so that the demolition crews could dispose of them for good.

  The biped Inorganics, and the massive Inorganic feline automata called Hellcats, were immobilized once the huge brain controlling them was deactivated. But it still made the REF uneasy to have thousands of them lying all over Tiresia, as though they might wake up at any moment. Orders had come down to move them to an appropriate site and blow them all to smithereens.

  Lang and Cabell and the other big IQs had taken a few of the things for study, but didn’t seem otherwise inclined to countermand the council’s orders. Be that as it might, all the lower ranks knew you didn’t rub General Edwards the wrong way without risking some real grief. The heavy machinery began lugging the inert enemy mecha for careful storage in the catacombs under the Royal Hall.

  Edwards took an aide, Major Benson, aside. “Get some of the Ghost Riders and keep an eye on things. Make sure the Invid mecha are all kept intact, understood?”

  “Yes, sir.” Benson recalled the bizarre events of the original capture of the Royal Hall: how Edwards had arranged to be first to break into the Invid command center deep beneath it.

  Benson could only guess at what his general’s plans were, but the aide made every attempt not to seem surprised or curious. Hitching your wagon to Edwards’s star offered the chance of vast rewards somewhere down the line, but stars had a way of flaring up and destroying the things around them. Discretion was the indispensible tool for survival in Ghost Squadron.

  “Wise-man, I’m told you wish to see me,” Bela said, entering Lang’s lab. She seemed cheerful with the prospect of having her heart’s desire fulfilled, but she stopped dead, glaring, when she saw Cabell and Rem standing by Lang’s side.

  Gnea had been following close behind her warlord, and now collided with her back. The smaller, younger amazon had the same lithe grace as Bela, but she was more prone to show wide-eyed wonder at the things around her, and lacked that hair-trigger temper that was already gaining Bela fame in the REF.

  Gnea’s eyes were a gold-flecked green, her long, straight hair a sun-bleached white. Her helm was crested with a long-necked reptilian image that had a head like a horned lizard. Her battle costume was of a different design from Bela’s, but had that same look of erotic glamour to it. Gnea wore sword and knife on her harness like Bela, but where the taller woman carried a crossbow, Gnea bore a Praxian naginata and a shield with a spiked boss in its center.

  “What are they doing here?” Bela indicated Rem and Cabell with an angry gestur
e of her chin, fingering her bow as if she were ready to fire. Gnea seemed about to bring her halberd’s curved blade into the ready position, glaring beneath feathery black brows.

  “They have been helping me with my research,” Lang answered, surprised. “They are allies of the REF now, just as you are.”

  “We Sentinels do not trust these spawn of the Robotech Masters,” Bela spat, “any more than we do the Zentraedi who brought suffering like the Invid did!”

  Gnea, eyes narrowed at Rem, added, “And you, you who so resemble Zor—we have reason to hate Zor, too, for the ruin his meddling brought down upon us.”

  “But he is not Zor,” Cabell told her, stroking his long white beard with one mandarin-nailed hand. “Nor am I a Robotech Master. Think of us, please, as two Tiresians who wish to help free all planets from the Invid.”

  Bela hissed at him in scorn and anger. Lang intervened. “Without their help, I couldn’t have finished this for you in time.”

  He gestured, and a powered partition folded aside accordian style. Bela gasped, and Gnea cried aloud, seeing what waited there.

  No one would ever mistake it for a live horse, even though it tossed its head, snorting, and dug its hoof at the deck in imitation of a real animal’s movements. The two wings that sprouted from its back were articulated, and changed shape and position, but were more like something from an airplane or ornithopter than any bird.

  Its leg structure widened somewhat down toward the hock, so that it seemed Lang’s wonder horse was wearing bell-bottoms from which its shining hooves poked. The thing was a glittering silver with jet-black trim. Its noble mane and forelock and tail of hair-fine wire tossed and glittered as it stamped, waiting.

  “She is magnificent,” Bela breathed, forgetting her anger. “Superb.” She went toward the mecha with one hand extended; the thing appeared to sniff at her. “Magical.”

  She appeared ready to vault astride, but Rem called out, “Wait!” As she whirled on him he held out her helm, showing her that the interior padding had been changed.

  “Control receptors,” Rem explained. “This is still a Robotech mecha, after all, and in order to control it, you’ll need to do a certain amount of mental imaging—visualizing what you want it to do.” She took the helm from him, settling it onto her head.

  Bela held her hand out to the horse again. “I shall call you ‘Halidarre,’ girl—after the free sky-spirit of our great heroine.

  “Halidarre I shall be,” the horse-mecha answered, in a synthesized voice that sounded much like Bela’s. Both women drew breath in surprise.

  “There are other things you will learn about Halidarre,” Cabell said, “as time passes. Things like this …”

  He touched a control, and Halidarre’s wings straightened, their area shrinking somewhat. From a niche in the mecha’s back, a cylindrical reconnaissance module rose into the air, using the wings and its own lifting field. Cabell touched another control, and the module returned to its niche.

  “Halidarre flies, too, just as promised,” Lang put in. “But more by her antigrav apparatus and impellers than by using her wings; the aerodynamics of a live flying horse are quite impossible, of course.”

  “He is also compatible with some of the other REF mecha, like the Cyclone combat cycles—” Rem was adding, but Bela cut him off with a gesture and leapt astride the Robotech Pegasus.

  “Halidarre, attached to a mere machine? Don’t be absurd!” she snorted. “Gnea, come!” Gnea obediently took her hand and swung up behind, one arm around Bela’s waist.

  “Thanks for this gift, Dr. Lang; I salute you and pledge my fealty to you.”

  Her expression hardened. “But as for you, Zor-clone, and you, servant to the Robotech Masters, do not try my patience, and stay well clear of the women of Praxis!”

  By way of underlining her warning, she turned and aligned her arm at the wooden leg of a lab table. She clenched her fist and made a sudden downward curling gesture with it, keeping the rest of her arm steady. A thin, gleaming object shot from the slightly bulky feature built into her forearm sheath.

  The three men turned to spy it quivering in the wood: a slim, hiltless throwing dagger—fired by some sort of spring-loaded device in the sheath, Lang supposed.

  Bela looked to Rem and Cabell again. “Be warned,” she said.

  CHAPTER

  NINE

  How I was torn when I saw that she wasn’t going! Surely, the Sentinels are venturing forth on a mission far more likely to bring enlightenment than is the mere mining of Fantoma and rebuilding the SDF-3!

  Just as certainly, along with the contemptible bloodshed that is war, there will be access to stupendous new horizons of knowledge and awareness. Perhaps keys to the Ultimate Truths that grow from the First Light, the birth pangs of the Universe!

  Enough; Minmei will stay behind and that’s only to be expected. Though the synergistic harmonies with Janice Em (and what of her? So many mysteries!) will be sundered, Lynn-Minmei seems to sense that the place for her and for her voice and her role in the Shapings—as Lang and Zand would have it—is here, with the REF.

  And so it is my place too; I am content. She’ll be here, away from Hunter, away from Wolfe—here, near me. What feelings this stirs, I don’t find myself able to put into words yet. I will allow myself some irony in this matter, and sign myself, when these writings turn to Minmei …

  REF Service #666–60–937

  From an enlisted lounge of SDF-3, there was a great view of the Sentinels’ flagship and the small escort flotilla from the dimensional fortress, preparing to get under weigh.

  Drives flared in the night of Valivarre’s umbra; the strange, orange-red fans of propulsive energy from Farrago stood out like a half-dozen immense, slitted searchlights—like no drives the REF had ever seen before, dwarfing those around the dreadnought. The Ur-Flower “peat” furnaces beamed incredible power out into space.

  Off duty, Minmei sat at the lounge’s piano by a big span of viewport, not even realizing that she was picking absently at the keys. The Agitprop and Psych/Morale people had wanted her to sing a final farewell concert with Janice. Something to work everybody up into a liberationist fervor and prepare them for whatever lay ahead—either the backbreaking labor of putting SDF-3 in working order or the life-on-the-line campaign to dislodge the fearsome Invid hordes from the planets they had enslaved. The REF was already exhausted from the round-the-clock working shifts to get the Sentinels’ mission ready.

  But Minmei didn’t feel like singing with Janice again. She refused to sing with the woman who had, in her opinion, betrayed her. For that matter, Minmei didn’t feel like singing for the war effort. The whole Superstar-savior-voice-of-humanity act was behind her, couldn’t they understand that? She was just another lowly recruit, and that was the way she wanted it.

  “The voice that won the Robotech War,” they had called her. But what had it ever brought her but a few glimmers of the spotlight, then pain and bitterness and loneliness? She considered the things she had been forced to endure in the wake of her triumphs, and decided that one more such victory would be her undoing.

  The escort flotilla had fallen in around the Sentinels’ flagship now, ready to guard it until it went superluminal. Then Farrago and the mismatched aliens and Earthers aboard would be on their own.

  Minmei realized that she was hitting familiar keys, one at a time and very slowly. The tempo was different now, mournful, like some old torch song from one of the great blues singers.

  She sang the words softly, letting her suffering come through, savoring the lyrics but filling them with irony.

  Life is only what we choose to make it

  Let us take it

  Let us be free

  Minmei chorded it unhurriedly, downbeat, so that the song sounded like it was time for the bartenders to be putting chairs upside down on the tables for closing. She felt her shoulders sag under a weight she simply wasn’t strong enough to bear anymore.

  There was a lamenting
in each word. The famous voice caressed, rasped resentfully, then caressed again.

  We can find the glory we all dream of

  And with our love,

  We can win …

  But there was a strength in the melancholy, a strength the blues had owned from the beginning, something stronger than all the up-tempo marches put together.

  The strength of survival—of going through the worst and coming out the other side saddened and chastened but alive and prepared to stay with the life that had done such unspeakable things to you, because there was no other life …

  Her head was bent over the keyboard now, long raven wings of hair shrouding her face. Perhaps a few, nearby, would hear, but she didn’t care. She looked again, briefly, to where the Sentinels’ engines lit the night, and the conventional drives of its REF escorts grew brighter in anticipation of departure.

  Minmei watched them as her fingers found unhurried chords that seemed predestined.

  If we must fight or face defeat,

  We must stand tall and not retreat

  Unseen by anyone but their owner, hands manipulated the lounge sound system control panel: turning down the gain; adjusting the very fine room directionals; punching a ship’s-intercom code that only certain selected commo personnel were supposed to know. Adjusting this; amplifying that—and it was all very practiced, very expert.

  Minmei’s song, low and intimate, was playing through the lounge softly, as if it were something a loud sound would shatter, amplified so discreetly that Minmei herself didn’t realize the sound system was on.

  It was channeled into the ship’s commo, and Lang’s head raised from his lab researches; Exedore’s eyes took on a faraway look; Captain Forsythe and the bridge gang stopped what they were doing and listened; many in SDF-3 fought the tide of emotion as the voice swept through them. Breetai, confronting bleak Fantoma, heard it through a commo patch-in over which he had just wished Rick and Lisa Hunter good fortune.