Dark Powers

by Jack McKinney

  But Senep had given a last order, and as the ball of superheated gas that had been the command ship expanded like a balloon, the troopships swung open like oysters about to yield pearls.

  Invid mecha began boiling forth from them: bizarre, armored crab-shapes of assorted types riding powerful thrusters, diving for the Sentinels.

  “Launch fighters!” Rick yelled. He could feel the ship shake as the Alphas and Betas of Skull Team roared from their launch tubes in the Ground Mobile Unit, and from the improvised bays in the rest of Farrago as well. “Vince, see if you can take out some of those other troop carriers!”

  But before the command was out of Rick’s mouth, the Sentinels’ ship shuddered from a second firing of the GMU’s monster cannon. Fastened to the underbelly of the ship as it was, the GMU wasn’t in the best position for accurate volleys; but Vince’s gunners and targetting equipment were unsurpassed. A second nova-beam went through a troop carrier like a leatherpunch through a bug. Less than half its mecha launched, the enemy craft vanished in outlashing starfire.

  “Commence firing! All batteries, commence firing!” Lisa was saying loudly but calmly into a mike. In all the mismatched portions of the ship, turrets and launchers opened up. The GMU’s secondary weapons began putting out the heaviest possible volume of fire. So did the non-transformable Destroid mecha that Vince Grant had moved into the ground unit’s larger airlocks, using them as gun emplacements—just as Henry Gloval had on SDF-1 during the desperate battle with Khyron out in Earth’s Pacific Ocean, so long ago.

  In rushed the Invid Pincer Ships, the massive Enforcers and comparatively small Scouts, firing as they came, enraged though they had no individual emotions, with the single-minded fury of a swarm of hornets.

  Out to meet them came the second-generation Alphas, sleekly lethal despite their deepspace augmentation pods; the burlier Betas, with their brute firepower and thrust; and the new Logans, with their rowboat-shaped noses, the latest word in Veritechs.

  Leading Skull Team were Max and Miriya Sterling, as cool and alert as ever. To them, as to the rest of the veteran Skulls, heavier Invid numbers just meant there were that many more opportunities to make kills. The dying began at once. Skull Team’s tactical net crackled with terse, grim exchanges, the pilots automatically maintaining an even strain, upholding the generations-old Yeager tradition of Cool In The Saddle.

  “Y’got one on your six, Skull Niner.”

  “Roger on that, Skull Two. Kin ya scratch my back?”

  “That’s affirm. Scissor right, and I’ll swat ’im for you.”

  The Beta that was Skull Nine drew the pursuing Invid Pincer Ship into Skull Two’s line of fire. Brief, flaring bursts of free-electron laser cannonfire skeeted the bogey out of existence.

  “Skull Leader,” Lisa’s voice came, “enemy element of six mecha has broken through your screen and is attacking the flagship.”

  “Skull Two, Skull Seven, go transact ’em,” Max delegated, still concentrating on the Pincer that was trying to get into Miriya’s six—the tail position, from which it could make the kill.

  Two and Seven, leading their wingmates, headed off on a rescue at least as dangerous as the dogfighting; the Sentinels’ AA fire was not as well coordinated as the REF fliers would have liked, and there was a very good chance the Skull two-ship elements would be flamed by friendly fire if the people on the bridge weren’t completely on top of things.

  On the other hand, that was what made combat more interesting to Max and his gang. They were the ultimate Robotech aces, living out on the edge where the juices flowed and death waved at you from every passing mecha.

  “Skull One, Skull One, go to Battloid and hold ’em; we’ll be right there,” somebody was saying. Miriya pulled off an amazing maneuver, flipping her Alpha like a flap-jack while the pursuing Pincer shot past her, its annihilation disks missing. Max’s wife was suddenly in the six position.

  Predator that she was, the onetime battle queen of the Quadranos lost no time in chopping away at the Pincer with short, highly controlled bursts of pumped-laser blasts. It trailed flame, debris, and outrushing gases for a moment, then became a drifting, brilliant cloudfront.

  Max and Miriya came as one to a new vector, to engage three oncoming armored-trooper skirmish ships.

  CHAPTER

  ELEVEN

  In my android state, I lack the appropriate Human referents to explain sufficiently what is transpiring here. I can only give factual synopses. But there is a Human phrase, employed in description of sporting events, that occurs to me, Dr. Lang: “playing over his-or-her head,” which refers to achievement—due to psychological, emotional, and other factors that resist analyses—in excess of what one might logically expect under given circumstances.

  Given that parameter, I think I can safely say that the Sentinels are playing over their heads. But the game has yet to reach its final score.

  Janice Em (in android state) in a report to Dr. Emil Lang

  Rick was trying to follow the battle both by eyeball—through the huge inverted bowl of the bridge canopy—and via the Sentinels’ still-unfamiliar tracking displays and tactical-readout screens. At the same time, he was doing his best to coordinate the Human and non-Human elements of the Sentinels, and make sure foe, not friend, was the target of Farrago’s gun turrets and missile tubes.

  But always, in the background, there was that small voice prodding and eating at him. He wanted so much to be out there in a VT, doing the only thing he had ever really done well in his life—piloting. To be left out of the rat race and yet be so close, so intimately involved in it, was such heartbreaking torture that it seemed the universe must be against him—that Creation was malign, after all.

  He was also keeping a nervous eye on that huge Sekiton-powered junction that held the ship together and made Farrago a functioning whole; if it failed, the Sentinels would be history.

  The pair of two-ship Skull elements dispatched by Max tackled the flight of six armored Shock Troopers that had penetrated the Sentinels’ defensive sphere. Far less maneuverable than the Pincers, the Shock Troopers mounted heavier firepower and had been no doubt sent in as kamikazes.

  But the VTs were there first, two Alphas and a scratch element made up of a Beta and a Logan. The Alphas went to Guardian mode, in that process unique to Robotechnology that Lang had dubbed mechamorphosis.

  The Beta reconfigured like some ultratech origami, thinning and extending as components flowed until it was in Battloid mode, a gleaming Herculean-looking Robotech body.

  The Logan went to Battloid, too, mechamorphosing in response to its pilot’s imaging. Where Alphas looked more Humaniform in Battloid, the Logan’s boatlike radome made it seem like the upper half of a Robotech torso had been lifted away and some Egyptian icon-mask, the Spirit of the Twin-Thrustered Rocketcraft, had been lowered into its place.

  But all the VTs were swinging and angling to confront the Invid. The Battloids clutched the repositioned cannon that had been integral weapons systems to the Beta and Logan but were now handheld infantry weapons, with barrels as wide as water mains, for the Robotech knights.

  The attackers came in, and crewbeings on the bridge ducked involuntarily, as the darkness lit with crisscrossed beams of pure destruction and streams of annihilation disks.

  The Shock Troopers looked like bipedal battleships, their clawed forearms bulging like ladybug carapaces. Their single sensor-eye clusters betrayed no emotion, and the twin cannon mounding at either shoulder made them appear invincible. But then the Battloids were there, and the mecha darted in and out of one another’s line of fire; the enormous energy discharges lit the bridge crew below.

  The hulking Logan stood in the teeth of withering fire from a Shock Trooper, the gun duel a simple question of who could get a telling hit first. In the meantime, a second Trooper was looping around for a pass from six o’clock, and nothing Rick could do in the bridge could get him a clear connection to that doomed pilot. Just about the time the oncoming Trooper
broke up into fragments before the monstrous outpouring of the Beta-Battloid’s gun, torso missile-rack covers flew back and a host of Swordfish air-to-airs corkscrewed at the Invid.

  The armored Shock Trooper disappeared in a cloud of detonating warheads. The Beta changed its attitude of flight with a complex firing of its many steering thrusters, and opened up again with its handheld artillery in support of the Logan.

  On the bridge, Lisa looked at Rick. No one could fault the job he was doing; despite the disadvantages of the Sentinels’ slapdash organization and communications systems, he was keeping things sorted out—was, perhaps, an even more pivotal part of the battle than she. And yet she could see, in the moment’s glance she could spare her husband, that he couldn’t cope with the frustration of his job much longer; that he was actually in pain because he wasn’t out there in the rat race.

  Another concussion shook the flagship and a beam leapt out from the muzzle of the GMU’s main gun. It was set for wider dispersal this time, since the clamshell troopships weren’t a worthwhile target anymore. The stupendous cannonshot took out a few of the enemy mecha, like killing several flies with a howitzer. But this was no artillery duel; the mecha would decide the day.

  The Alphas sent by Max Sterling mopped up the enemy machines that the Battloids hadn’t stopped. The very last armored Shock Trooper tried a headfirst dive at the very bridge canopy, and most of the beings there dove for the deck, useless as that was, by sheer reflex.

  The Beta got in its way, backpack thrusters flaring so hard that the wash of flame blew across the adamantine bridge canopy. Some systems overloaded and areas of the shields failed. There were explosions, sending flame and shrapnel flying, and everybody’s ears popped as the ship began to lose atmosphere.

  There were only a few Sentinels on their feet. Lron, at the wheel, held his place and let forth a challenging rumble. From where she stood, hands at the small of her back, Lisa looked every inch the captain—near the helm. She saw Rick still at his place; he turned, with a frantic look on his face, a look that was haunted and bereft—yet it held so much fear, wildness …

  But at that moment, he saw that Lisa was all right, and he burst into a grin and gave her the thumbs-up, then turned back to his coordinating duties. Lisa understood that the panic in his eyes was that she might have been hurt, or killed. It had been a sudden vacancy—an immobility, really. True fear, and Lisa recognized it because she had seen it before, and felt it herself. Terror that he had lost her; it had debilitated him for a moment.

  She thrust the thought aside. A few hundred yards above the long blister of the bridge, the damaged Logan had actually bulldogged an incoming armored Shock Trooper, interposing itself and going hand-to-hand with one of the enemy’s most feared mecha.

  The bridge crew couldn’t hear the creaking of metal, the hiss of compromised seals, the parting of welds and seams. They watched the silent wrestling match as the bigger, stronger Beta rushed in to lend support. But the Beta was too far away.

  The armored Shock Trooper grappled the Logan around into a certain mecha-infighting position, spread-eagling it, and bent it backward across one knee. There were the puffs of escaping atmosphere and the electrical arcing of destroyed systemry.

  The Beta blindsided the Shock Trooper, rebounding to hit thrusters again and lock with it in mortal combat. Despite everything the Shock Trooper could do, the Beta Battloid forced its arms back and back—and worked a wholly Human wrestling hold, freeing one arm to grip the monolithic turret-head, seize, strain, apply torque with everything it had.

  Rick was ordering the Beta clear; the flagship had been maneuvered so that the GMU’s cannon had been brought to bear. But the Beta wouldn’t relinquish its death grip on its foe. The Shock Troopers’ pincers scraped deep furrows in the Beta’s armor; its oval forearms levered in moves conceived to let it break free.

  To no avail. The Beta bent the Shock Trooper’s arm up around behind it, and Rick understood in that moment that where matters of Robotechnology stood even, a deciding factor emerged. That factor had to do with things that were the exact opposite of mechanical processes. Emotion and belief, a passion for victory that was fueled by hatred of the outrages the Invid had perpetrated; in place of the un-questioned instructions the Invid got from their Hive, the Beta was animated by a reasoned mind’s drive to win.

  The Beta got its free elbow under the Shock Trooper’s chin and pressed up and back, and back. All this, while VTs and enemy mecha swirled and fought, while the kill scores climbed, while Farrago’s gun emplacements hammered.

  There was a slight outventing, then seals gave and atmosphere rushed from the Invid, along with what appeared to be a green liquid that became weightless beads and globules and vapor as soon as it hit vacuum. The Invid came apart with explosive separations of its joints. The Beta braced one bulky foot against the dead carcass of it, and pushed free.

  The Beta sailed like some lumpy puppet toward the dead Logan. “No life readings,” somebody relayed the readout to Lisa; the Logan was so mangled that it came as no surprise.

  Rick looked up from his apparently primitive but surprisingly sophisticated scopes. His features were closed of expression; self-contained. “Those are the Valdezes.”

  Everyone knew them, brother and sister VT hotdoggers, top-of-the-roster aces. Henry had flown the Logan; his sister had just avenged his death in the mighty Beta.

  The repeated attacks of the Invid had only turned the battle into a turkey shoot; what the REF mecha didn’t bag, the Sentinels’ guns had managed to find. Lisa heard from her commo analysts that the instant destruction of the task force’s command ship had kept word from going out to Optera, or even Karbarra, of the presence of the Sentinels. Something groundside might have detected the weapons discharges in space, but the Invid garrison must have been at a loss as to what they meant. Karbarra had a thick planetary ring, and the Invid below might think that was the cause of the commo breakdown. It didn’t make much difference to the Sentinels now; Human and XT alike, they had gone to war—and in this Robotech era that meant something they were all used to: win or die.

  The energy salvos and counter-salvos sent narrow beams of blindingly bright light and streams of angry red-orange annihilation disks skewing through the blackness. The mecha whirled and pounced like craft maneuvering in atmosphere, though that was prodigiously wasteful of power; such were the peculiarities of Robotech, the pilots’ Earth-honed flying instincts channeled to action by the thinking caps.

  It was the thickest of the rat race, the centerpoint of the fighter pilot’s life, the Heart of Unreason—the terrible venue of the dogfight.

  Barrages of missiles whooshed and energy blasts of such power were exchanged that they seemed almost material. Holed and damaged machines tumbled and spun, leaking atmosphere and flame, and dying. The Invid fought with the unanimity of the group mind, but it became manifest that the REF, too, had learned to wage war with total concentration. Neither side lacked for ferocity.

  But the tide turned in the Sentinels’ favor; in a mass Robotech rat race like that, the shift didn’t take long to make itself apparent.

  Max and Miriya flew through it like gods, dealing death when they saw an opponent and, by their intervention, granting life to beset VT fliers. Max felt like he had an extra edge, with Rick behind on the bridge.

  Once Max’s boss as Skull Leader, Rick had been away from combat flying too long to be jumping into a VT seat, no matter how restless he might feel. Max had already saved Rick’s life once, at considerable risk to his own, since Rick had begun chafing at the restrictions of flag-rank life.

  Max had to endure no such distractions now; with the enormously augmented power the pods and other enhancements of their Alphas gave them, Max and Miriya, wingmates and soulmates, flew where they willed. Mighty Enforcers and evasive Pincers were their prey, like prey for tigers. The Invid quarry stalked the VTs, too, with fire that could kill them, but that only made the hunt more worthwhile.

  Computer a
nd sensor constructs of the battle in various tactical-analysis thinkpools showed a moving nimbus of death and destruction—Max and Miriya Sterling, in an almost superhuman performance of cunning and aero-combat excellence.

  The tide turned quickly and surely against the survivors of the late Senep’s task force. In seconds, the scale had dipped unmistakably; the Invid were trying to disengage, to run for troop carriers that weren’t there anymore, as the volcanic cannonshots of Vince Grant’s GMU found their mark again and again.

  The Invid’s turning tail tripped some essential instinct of pursuit in the VTs, and they rushed in, crowding one another, for the kill. A whole field of retreating Invid media were suddenly in a shooting gallery like nothing seen in any Robotech scrap so far. Some turned to fight, others ran and dodged; the Skull fliers went after them all, merciless because they had seen what the Invid did to captive worlds, and hungry for kills. Wolves flying at the fold were no more voracious.

  Screened from Karbarra by its planetary ring and by the jamming efforts of the ECM techs, the Sentinels had managed to win their first battle with a sort of unintended stealth. But the first of their main events waited below.

  The last of the killing was still going on, the mopping-up of the Invid mecha being carried out by the men and women of the Skull squadron, but that was already a fait accompli. Rick Hunter wanted to stay where he was until the last of the VTs was back, safe, or at least accounted for. But he knew he couldn’t; the strike at Karbarra must be launched now, within the hour, because the Sentinels’ presence might already have been discovered.

  Rick had a sudden vision of Henry Gloval, and knew what had been trying to bow the old man’s shoulders as he stood there on the deck of SDF-1 in the old days. Rick thought of Lisa with a vast burst of love, and wondered whether any of the Sentinels would be alive in a few hours.