Dark Powers

by Jack McKinney

  Rick and the others dashed aboard while the ship was still hovering, the engines barely lowering in pitch. “Move it! Move it!” Rick was yelling, even before they reached their seats.

  Rem complied, the shuttle leaping away only a yard or two above the flat desert. Rick had started for the copilot’s seat, to take over, when he saw with some shock that it wasn’t there. Rem had neglected to mention that particular piece of damage. Rick knew Rem was a pretty fair pilot; he would just have to trust the youngster to handle the mission, because there was no time to land and change places. Rick buckled into an acceleration seat and hung on.

  Rem cut the shuttle in the direction of the concentration camp as Lron had spotted it on the map. They saw no Invid patrols; Rem said that Invid occupation forces had pulled back most of their mecha in anticipation of Tesla’s arrival, to render military honors.

  Rick checked the screens and could see, far to the west, the approach of the Farrago. The Skulls and the Wolfe Pack could reach the objective faster than the shuttle; Rick just hoped they hurried.

  “Patch me through to Captain Hunter,” he told Gnea, who was sitting at the commo officer’s station, but she shook her head.

  “Can’t, sir. We had some system burnout when we applied power to lift off. No commo with the flagship at all.”

  We’re on our own, Rick realized. What else was new? He hoped the timetable didn’t change, because if it did, he was living his last few moments then and there.

  “No!” Tesla wailed. “I refuse! Put me back in irons; torture me! I will not go down that gangway to be roasted like an insect!”

  Lisa Hunter showed him a control unit. “If you do as I tell you, you’ll be all right; if you don’t, your head’s going bye-bye, snail-face.”

  She tried to sound as ruthless as she could, but she doubted she could actually do it in cold blood. It was against the REF rules of war, and went against what she believed in. On the other hand, she was counting on Tesla to evaluate things in terms of what he would do if the situation were reversed.

  * * *

  A minute or so later the Farrago drifted at a near-hover through the opening in the Tracialle city dome. It settled down on an acres-wide landing area near the heart of the capital, amid the blunt, functional buildings typical of Karbarran architecture.

  The city stood on a mesa surrounded by chasms thousands of feet deep; the glassy hemisphere over it and the upper portion of the city itself rested on an immense cylinder reinforced by hydraulic shock absorbers something like a cross between an insect’s leg and a flying buttress. It reminded her of a titanic mushroom sprouting limbs.

  The ship’s forward ramp opened and Tesla stepped out. Arrayed below him in rank upon rank were the biped Inorganics—Scrim and Crann and Odeon. Few Hellcats were present; they were difficult to control among dense populations. Other troops were keeping the crowds of curious but silent Karbarrans back beyond the far periphery of the landing site.

  “Hail, Tesla!” cried the local commander, in his eerie, artificial voice. “And welcome to the Regent’s loyal and contented dominion of Karbarra!” That brought an angry rumbling from the crowd, but no outbursts.

  Tesla, trembling a little, replied over a loudspeaker, “A-and hail to the stalwart Invid garrison! To add to our glory, I bring you captives lately taken in my … my momentous clash with the Sentinels!”

  At that, cargo ramps extended from the various independent modules that made up the flagship, including the GMU. The Destroids marched down them, mostly single file or at most two abreast, due to their size.

  “Prisoners of war!” Tesla was haranguing. “New slaves to fight for the honor and increase of our Regent!”

  The garrison commander hesitated, surprised, conversing with the Living Computer for a moment before saying, “Well done. To serve the Regent is the only reason for living.”

  The first of the Destroids had reached the landing-zone surface, and began forming up in single ranks. Still more emerged from the flagship. “But, perhaps these examples will suffice for now,” the commander added.

  “They are all completely under my sway,” Tesla vouched, voice cracking a bit, as he edged toward the hatch.

  “That may be,” the commander replied, “but such creatures are lower life-forms, wild animals, unpredictable.” He turned to his Inorganics. “Deactivate those mecha and remove their occupants from them!”

  As the first ranks of Inorganics moved at once to obey, Tesla turned and dove headlong through the hatch. Lisa, watching from the bridge, thought, Dammit! She had hoped all the Destroids could emerge and get to more advantageous positions before the crunch came.

  “Fire at will!” she yelled.

  CHAPTER

  EIGHTEEN

  The ‘Gaia’ model was by then so thoroughly entombed, we had to blow the dust off it and study up in a hurry once we met the Gerudans. The theory of a planetary ecology as, in essence, a single interactive metaorganism? Too absurd to accept, right?

  You wouldn’t last long in the Great Beyond, Citizen.

  Jack Baker, Upwardly Mobile

  Living well isn’t the best revenge. General T. R. Edwards thought, lounging in his luxurious chair. Revenge is the best revenge!

  But better yet to have both: comfort, and the blood of an enemy flowing.

  And surely the blood of his enemies was flowing even now. Despite the spottiness of interstellar communications, the Farrago had gotten through a message that the Sentinels had suffered casualties in one battle and were now launching themselves against an Invid stronghold in another. There were those on the Plenipotentiary Council who had talked vaguely of sending reinforcements, but Edwards had managed to nip that one right away.

  Now he gazed out over Tiresia with vast satisfaction. For the most part, the city had been cleared of rubble, its unsalvagable debris and structures removed, and was quickly being rebuilt. Not much of a miracle, really, given Robotechnology. And REF Base Tirol was well on its way to completion; in fact, Edwards was looking down from his office on the top floor of the headquarters building.

  It stood like the lower half of some early ICBM missile, a vaned cylinder at the center of great ribbon loops of elevated roadway. There had been some nonsense about putting the council up here, but with pressure tactics and backstage maneuvering, Edwards had gotten his way. That was becoming more and more the case.

  Edwards wasn’t altogether satisfied that some resources were being diverted into urban renewal, rather than into building the fleet of starships he meant to commandeer for his own designs, but some things couldn’t be helped. At least it was making the Tiresians more tractable and grateful, and they, too, would have their uses, not far down the line.

  Of course, Lang, and the sprawling research complex he was setting up with Exedore, were necessary inconveniences. He had to be kept pacified and working on the SDF-3 and the fleet above all.

  A buzz from his aide announced that Lynn-Minmei was waiting to see General Edwards. He acknowledged, then flicked the control in his chair’s arm, spinning back to look across a gleaming, polished desk as big as a landing field.

  Lynn-Minmei? Now what in—

  It was a bit of a shock when she stepped through the door in a cadet uniform, halted before his desk, and saluted smartly. He still didn’t think of her as military. “Cadet Lynn, requesting permission to speak to the general, sir.”

  He returned the salute slowly. “Permission granted. Stand at ease.”

  She only relaxed a little. “General, I know something about people, and while everybody’s been working like dogs to accomplish our mission here, time’s been passing and, well …”

  “I haven’t got all day, Cadet,” Edwards grated. “Spit it out!”

  He was pleased to see he had made her flinch. “People need something to keep them going,” she burst out. “I know! I saw it in SDF-1! They’re sort of coming up with what recreation they can now, of course, but that’s very makeshift and haphazard.

  “Wh
at we need is an organized program of entertainment, and some kind of center where people could go to unwind, no matter what shift they’re working or who they are. So they could forget their troubles and have their spirits lifted. A place where they could remember—remember why we all came here in the first place.”

  She said that last softly, she who hadn’t been invited on the REF mission in the first place.

  Edward’s own voice took on a softness, a dangerous tone from him. “Let me be clear on this. Knowing your past, do I assume you’re suggesting we open up a cabaret?

  “No, a service club!” she corrected. “People need their morale kept up, sir!”

  “And you’re just the one to organize it, hmm?”

  She couldn’t meet his gaze for a moment. She knew that all her arguments were true, but Edwards had seen right through her. When she had sung that last good-bye aboard the superdimensional fortress when the Farrago left, she had sworn she wouldn’t sing in public again.

  But bit by bit, her resolve had crumbled. She missed it too much. She missed the good things her songs did for people, the happiness they brought. But she had to admit that she missed the spotlight, too, the applause and adulation and attention. They were in her blood. She needed them.

  The REF’s situation was so much like Macross’s in the old SDF-1 that it was as if her life were a Möbius strip. And so she found herself following old forms, feeling old longings and dreaming dreams she had told herself to bury.

  “I’m more knowledgeable about show business than anybody else we’ve got, sir,” she pressed on. “I’ll do it on my off-duty time! But I was hoping you’d speak to the council, General.”

  It all sounded like something out of one of those twentieth-century films for which he had such utter contempt. Hey, I’ve got it, we’ll put on the show in the barn! Yeah, you can make the costumes! Swell; they can build the sets!

  He almost ridiculed her out loud, would have enjoyed it, but at the last second held back. There was something about her presence, her gamine appeal and wide-eyed win-someness. Where other men might have felt attracted to her, and suddenly protective toward her, Edwards began to feel possessive.

  He knew she had been courted by hundreds of love-struck admirers, worshipped by thousands, perhaps millions, of fans. And none had had her, none had really touched her, save only two. One of those, Lynn Kyle, her distant cousin, was long since missing and presumed dead back on Earth.

  Edwards also knew that Minmei had once been Hunter’s passion. He was aware, too, through his spies, that fool Wolfe had a hopeless crush on her.

  Minmei wasn’t sure what reactions or thoughts she was seeing cross Edwards’s face; the gleaming half cowl and scintillating lens-eye made it difficult to tell.

  Edwards steepled his hands before him and tilted his chair back. “This idea may have some merit, Cadet. We’ll discuss it further over dinner.”

  In Edwards’s mind, she was already his, body and soul.

  Kami realized blearily that he was being borne along to the clanking of mecha. Reviving a little, he saw to his horror that he was in the grip of a Crann Inorganic.

  The memory of being jumped, mixed with his Vision, began to sort out as he struggled like a wild thing to no effect. The dreadful recollections of being caged by Tesla made him look about for a way to take his own life. The Inorganic’s armor and grotesque design screamed mindless hatefulness; the sky was screeching a death song at him.

  But he was held fast and couldn’t squirm free. That changed in a few moments, though, as he was dropped without ceremony. He landed in a heap on hard, gritty soil, dazed, the Vision almost clouding over into unconsciousness. He could hear the Invid marching away, and could make no sense of it.

  Something prodded him. Kami rolled over with a sharp yip of alarm, to find himself looking up at a ring of furry faces. “What are you?” one of them said. “Are you an Invid, then?”

  One of the others made an exasperated sound and jabbed the first with an elbow. “Stupid! How could he be an Invid?”

  “Well, he’s no Karbarran!” the first shot back, and they seemed about to scuffle.

  “I’m a Gerudan,” Kami said tiredly. “Don’t they teach you whelps anything in school?”

  He could see he had found the Karbarran children, even if he had arrived in somewhat ignominious fashion.

  They started to babble, and a few of them worked up the courage to actually give him a hand getting to his feet. The Karbarran children were roly-poly versions of their elders, some of them nearly as tall as Kami himself; but unlike their parents, the cubs wore no goggles. Their eyes were round, dark, and moist.

  He groaned, trying to bring things into focus. One of the cubs tried to touch his mask and he gave the paw a little slap; it was withdrawn. Kami couldn’t understand why the Invid had taken his weapons and gear and yet left him his mask and tank. Perhaps they knew that they wouldn’t have a sane prisoner for very long—or a live one—if they took the breather from him.

  There were some hundred or so miniature Karbarrans around him, and many, many more walking around an extensive barracks area. From the size of the place, he was prepared to believe that just about every cub of the planet’s reduced population was there. Most of them seemed list-less though, not caring that something was going on.

  Kami squinted a bit in the early light of Yirrbisst, glancing around to orient himself to the landmarks he had seen on the map and get his bearings. It wasn’t long after sunrise; the raiders would be here soon and he must prepare the cubs as best he could. But the three-in-a-row spike crags weren’t there; the broken butte was nowhere in view, the foothills covered with scrub growth couldn’t be seen.

  His blood suddenly went cold. The Invid have moved them! This isn’t the place on the map!

  “Where are we?” he asked the first cub who had spoken to him, a tubby little male with streaked highlights in his pelt.

  “The old Sekiton works,” the cub said. “They moved us here from the prison compound near the city so they could guard us easier.” The young Karbarran pointed vaguely toward the rising greenish primary, Karbarra’s star. “You can barely even see Tracialle from the tallest tower here.”

  The raid on the old prison had provided for searching possible alternative sites near the city, but not this far out. Kami looked off the way the cub had pointed, feeling waves of defeat flow over him.

  “Sir? Sir?” the little one was saying. “Who are you?”

  He shook off his despair as he would have shaken off water, fur ruffling and standing out, tail fluffing. He held out his hand to them for silence.

  Somehow the valve of his breather had been turned down. He increased the flow a bit, looking at the sky, inhaling.

  Lron had been unfair, and wrong, in accusing the Gerudans of using hallucinogens. The fact was that the Gerudans’ mental processes were symbiotically linked with an astounding range of microorganisms and a wide variety of complex trace molecules found in their planet’s ecosystem.

  Their brain activity was a result of interaction with these factors in their environment. It reacted to and was influenced by those stimuli on a subcellular and even atomic level, in ways that left Human molecular psychologists shaking their heads and talking to themselves.

  Gerudan life was a partnership with their world; their neurological systems were a vital part of the reproductive cycle of the microscopic life-forms that were indispensible to the Gerudans’ perception and very ability to think.

  Kami inhaled and thought. Certain perceptions began to shift and intensify. The sky sang a dirge and the windblown sand took on strange shapes. Then he realized something was chanting, in a register so low he could barely hear it. He knelt and put his ear to the ground; the cubs looked at one another dubiously.

  Kami listened to the dull thrumming.

  Sekiton. Sekiton. Sekiton.

  Of course. He spun to the cub who had spoken to him. “My name is Kami. Who are you?”

  The cub drew hims
elf up proudly. “I’m Dardo, son of Lron and Crysta, leaders among our people. The children needed a leader, too, and so I got them organized. My parents—”

  So apparently this was the action committee, the ones who hadn’t succumbed to hopelessness.

  “I know them. Listen, all of you! We haven’t much time. There’s still Sekiton around here, is there not?”

  “Over in the warehouse.” Dardo pointed to a low bunker. “There’s not much use for it now that the Invid stopped us from spacefaring.”

  But between the prisoners and the Sekiton was an imprisoning Invid energy wall, a ghostly curtain of angry red power a hundred feet high, generated by pylons spaced every hundred yards around the prison compound. Kami knew that it meant a searing burn and unconsciousness to get too close to one, and immolation to try to pass through.

  “So Sekiton’s not much good to us anymore,” Dardo said. “Worse luck, because there’s still plenty of it around here everywhere.”

  He scuffed the sand aside with his foot, digging down a depth of several inches. Pushing aside thicker, grittier soil, Dardo dug stubby fingers in and came up with a fistful of darkish Sekiton mixed with sand. “See?”

  “Yes; I’ve seen the stuff, thank you,” Kami said offhandedly. Yirrbisst was getting higher, and there wasn’t much time left. With the first air strikes or the attack of the Destroids, the order would go out for the killing to begin at the concentration camp.

  Dardo shrugged, formed the clot into a dirtball, and heaved it. The dirtball went up in a blaze as it hit the energy wall. Another cub took some and heaved it for an even bigger fireworks effect. From the gouges here and there around the compound, Kami could see that they had done it quite often to pass the time.

  Sekiton, Sekiton. Sekiton. The ground thumped it into his feet like the vibration of some huge pile driver, but the message was lost on him. Kami picked up a clot of the stuff, too, made a ball of it, and heaved it disgustedly at the wall.