Dark Powers

by Jack McKinney

  Tesla assumed what he hoped looked like a prayerful attitude. “I don’t ask you to free me. Nor even to trust me. I only ask you, Burak, to listen to me.”

  Burak stayed back out of range, but he leaned closer.

  Rick Hunter had been thinking about taking some disciplinary action against Jack Baker until he found him gathered with most of the rest of the scouting party, sitting there on the rump of the dead Hellcat overlooking the Teddy Bears’ Picnic.

  Lron was still down among the cubs, and transports were on the way to lift the Karbarran youngsters out now that Lisa and the others in Tracialle had gotten the dome open and the last of the Inorganics were dead.

  Rick moved toward them, just in time to hear Bela avow, “He’s got the guts of a Praxian! Jack Baker’s just like a daughter to me!”

  She didn’t seem to understand why several people were guffawing and Jack was turning pinker than usual. Maybe he’s been punished enough, Rick thought; it was a line that would pursue Baker for the rest of his military career. Sackcloth and ashes could be no worse.

  Bela spit in her palm and held it out. Jack spit on his and clasped with her, arm-wrestling style, then winced a bit when she inadvertently crunched his fingers together.

  Kami was there, too, and cubs kept running up to him with every sort of minor update on what was going on, or simply to hold onto a tuft of his fur. He had freed them, and his pelt was a lot more familiar to them than all the armor and uniforms they saw around them. Several had found their way up into his lap, even though Karbarran cubs were big for a Gerudan to hold.

  Rick forgot all about his official duty and just stood to one side, watching. If he went over to join them, things would change. The issue of rank would appear.

  So he leaned against the corner of the bunker and watched. Gnea put a well muscled arm around Rem and gave him a buss on the cheek, yelling something about Hellcats. Halidarre, like something from the Arabian Nights, reared a bit every now and then, beating her wings slowly.

  He left them to their moment and went off to get a lift back to the capital. He just didn’t feel like it was a win yet; he had to hear it from Lisa, see it on her face.

  Things about love you hadn’t quite anticipated: lesson 207, he thought wryly.

  Lightning like this would shake any Human’s faith in God, Breetai thought as a passing observation, while one of the rolling, rainless storms of Fantoma lit the sky, exciting the chancy tectonics of the planet and resounding against the hard sides of the mining machines and armored workers.

  Here in the thicker medium of the unbreathable Fantoman atmosphere, great Breetai gazed down on a place out of memory.

  Zarkopolis!

  The history of a people, a race, all stemming from the first awakenings there; the things that had been blanked from neuron altogether but somehow, stubbornly, remained in marrow and soul—the past was washing in on him and he could no more sort it out than pick a handful from a wave.

  With the mining operation safely established, Breetai had flown back for a look at Zarkopolis, the city where the Zentraedi had begun. A haunted world, he thought yet again, for the latest of times past counting.

  Breetai took a step forward, to go down and look at the Zentraedi past. The officers who accompanied him made that same step, like shadows.

  “Stay back,” he bade them. “You may return to the camp; I wish to be alone.” They hesitated, then obeyed.

  There were only two Zentraedi from those days still alive, the ultimate survivors, and Exedore was now a happily diminutive little Human. The thought was unkind, but he couldn’t help it; only Breetai was left.

  With his vast strides, it didn’t take him long to make his way down into the deserted city. He saw the high, fluted spires that had been erected by his people in defiance of the terrible gravity, not to announce their greatness so much as to affirm the Zentraedi ability to endure, to overcome, through sheer stubbornness and backbreaking hard work. How different a legacy from what the Robotech Masters had given them!

  As a memory-wiped warrior for the Masters, he had always felt contempt for the scurrying, insect-colony industriousness of subject races—of workers. But now he looked upon Zarkopolis, remembering the pain and striving in each chisel mark, each laboriously-raised slab.

  And memories began returning to him, recollections of what his people had been at the outset: builders and strivers, who had more in common with the Micronians of Earth, and Macross, and SDF-1, than the Robotech Masters had dared let the Zentraedi know.

  It is no wonder to me, now, that we were moved so deeply by Minmei’s songs, he thought. At last, at last, I understand!

  With that there came a measure of peace within him.

  Now he plodded down—the soil falling so fast, and abrading his boots with its weight—toward the stand of cream-colored bunkers and low domes and hunkering complexes that had been the center of all Zentraedi life so long ago.

  He stopped. Why return to the source of so much pain and regret and resentment? But—he couldn’t hold himself back, despite his iron will.

  He had to go down yet again into the weathered, haunted precincts of the Zentraedi workers, and the multitude of voices that spoke to him across the ages. He didn’t know why, knew only that he must stand there again, in the center of it all.

  “My lord?”

  He turned more slowly than he would have under lesser gravity; sudden moves could injure even the mightiest Zentraedi here. Kazianna Hesh was catching up with him, moving with unwise haste in her modified Quadrano suit.

  She was again wearing those cosmetics the Human females favored. It confused him, seeing her features behind the tinted facebowl of her helmet. He said, “What do you want here? You should be at your work.”

  She was a little out of breath. Kazianna panted, looking at him earnestly. “My work is done and I am off shift, my lord. I—I had hoped that you would tell me why Zarkopolis obsesses you so, and show me the city where once the Zentraedi dwelt.”

  He looked down at her and wondered how old she was. In the heyday of the Robotech Masters’ empire, the life expectancy of a clone warrior was less than three years, and it was virtually certain that she was one of the hordes brought forth to fill the empty spots in the ranks.

  But—whence this curiosity? This disturbing presence that she seemed to have? Breetai turned to look out upon Zarkopolis and suddenly understood that these characteristics were things manifest in all Zentraedi, in times past. That they should surface again now was, it could be argued, a very good sign.

  “Very well; I shall.” He started off again and she fell in with him. Breetai led the way down into the city, pointing this way and that, telling her the things that had come buzzing back into his head with the return to Fantoma and, all of a sudden, not hiding in the gaps in his memory.

  “In that hall we met to thrash out problems, all of us; it took a very long time to cut the stone columns perfectly, so that they would support the weight of the roof, and even longer to assemble the roof.”

  A little further on, “Here, the clones were grown, coming forth when they were ready for work, descending those steps over there to adulthood.” Steps he had never walked until recently; Breetai antedated the city, had helped raise it.

  And so they went. Breetai was pleased, for reasons he couldn’t name, to have someone with whom to share his memories. At last they came to a nondescript little house in a tract of them. It was only slightly more prestigious than the mass barracks in which most Zentraedi had lived.

  Breetai pressed a button with an armored finger; the airlock swung open. Kazianna could see that it had been refitted to function again after a span of centuries. She had no doubt that Breetai had done it. Lightning was breaking again, and the odd, emphatic thunder of three-g Fantoma was sounding as the outer hatch slid shut.

  Inside, the place was unprepossessing, the quarters of a worker/engineer. He had cleaned up the mess, but there were still a few models left, still a few mounted sketche
s, from the days when a different Breetai had dreamed larger dreams than all the Robotech Masters’ fantasies of galactic conquest—dreams of building.

  Breetai saw Kazianna looking around, and realized how spartan the furnishings were. In the age since he had lived in that place, he had learned to deceive, but he spoke the simple truth now. “I was the biggest and the strongest of the miners, the first of them,” he said. “Only our leader, Dolza, was bigger than I; only he and Exedore were older.

  “But—I had few friends—no life, really, except in my work. It seemed to me that they all thought me—”

  He stopped, astonished, as she cracked the seal on her helmet and threw it back. Of course, her suit’s instruments would have told her there was breathable atmosphere in the tiny quarters—atmosphere he had put there. Only he hadn’t seen her check her instruments, and suspected she had done it on what the Humans called “instinct.”

  “They all thought you what,” Kazianna Hesh encouraged him, walking around, glancing at his sketches, opening the other seams in her armor. “Thought you too stoic, thought you too formidable, great Breetai? Treated you so that you felt easier when you were either working or alone?”

  She had always been deferential toward him, but now she sounded somehow teasing. She had made her circuit of the tiny living room and stopped now to flick the control that broke the seal on his own helmet. “They didn’t see what was there inside?”

  She unsealed his helmet and lifted it off, having to rise on her tiptoes to do it even though she was tall. The reinforced floor groaned beneath them. Breetai was too astonished to speak, and the wall was behind his shoulders so he couldn’t retreat.

  “Couldn’t see the real Breetai?” she went on. “Well, my lord, I can.” She pulled his head down to her, like some Human, and he found himself being thoroughly kissed. How had she learned about things like this, forbidden to the Zentraedi?

  Many of his race had spent time Micronized to Human size. Maybe that had affected her somehow, or she had seen or heard something.

  But he had little time to wonder about that. A kiss; the sight of such an act had almost debilitated him once, when Rick Hunter and Lisa Hayes performed it on a Zentraedi meeting table. He was awkward at first, self-conscious, but Kazianna didn’t appear to mind and in fact didn’t seem to know a great deal more about it than he.

  When the kiss ended, he would have caught her up in his arms for more, but she held him off and began alternately popping the seals on his suit and her own.

  It suddenly came to him what she had in mind. “You … this is proscribed.”

  “By whom? By Robotech Masters who have fled beyond the stars? By laws that were never really ours?”

  Breetai thought about that, and considered his hunger for her, too. The bed was refurbished; he had slept there once or twice on his off-duty hours, waiting for the past to filter into his mind once again.

  Breetai put his arms around Kazianna and kissed her carefully, very happy about it but aware that he had a great deal to learn. Then he took her gauntleted hand and led her to his sleeping chamber. Since he had built the house back in the early days of the Tiresian Overlords who were to become the Robotech Masters, no one else had ever been in that room.

  CHAPTER

  TWENTY-TWO

  In spite of her resistance, he presses her. His great evil is attracted to her illuminating goodness, like some primal circling of forces.

  Does he sense that he only continues to live on my sufferance? I believe so; something in him is too animalistic to miss the emanations. But he has only a little time to mend his ways.

  Otherwise, I shall kill Edwards in the next day or so.

  REF #666–60–937

  “A little to the right. No, no! My right!”

  The enlisted men hanging the REF SERVICE CLUB sign were certain that it was centered and even, but not surprised that Minmei wasn’t satisfied. The club had been her obsession ever since the council had given her the go-ahead. Her headache and her firstborn, all wrapped up in one.

  Minmei tried to be patient and remind herself that the techs had volunteered their own time to help. But the sign was just about the last thing to take care of; the club would open that night. And she had been through a lot to see her dream come true. But soon—in hours—she would be standing under the spotlights again, singing out to the dim sea of faces, making contact with fellow Human beings in the only way that had ever been possible for her, really …

  Speaking of ongoing problems—General Edwards’s military limo pulled up right behind her, almost tickling her bottom with one of the flags mounted on its front fenders.

  Edwards, in a rear seat bigger than some living quarters, lowered his window with the touch of a button. “How’s our nightingale’s cage coming along?”

  She wished he would stop talking like that, but Minmei knew she was walking a fine line again. Offending him would no doubt make him withdraw his support from the project, and that might very well be the end of things.

  On the other hand, she didn’t know how much longer she could keep him at bay. Since that very first interview he had kept her on the defensive, and Minmei was running out of excuses—why she couldn’t have dinner with him, give a private recital for him, attend a diplomatic function on his arm, or take any one of a dozen other first steps on a path that ended at his bedside.

  “Top drawer, sir, as you can see. The doors open at 2000 hours SDF time.” She saw a flicker of frown cross the exposed half of his face; she still wasn’t using his first name.

  Edwards pressed another button and the door lifted out of the way, brushing against her. Minmei started for the club entrance as if she had something to do, but he caught up with her in moments. The volunteer techs watched the two enter the club, looked at one another, then began fixing the sign into place.

  Edwards took her elbow as if to assist her through the doorway, but in reality he was simply grabbing her—was just barely restraining himself from shaking her. He swept a hand at the club’s main lounge—the stage and tables and chairs.

  “Are you going to keep pretending this is going to make you happy? When it didn’t before, when applause from audiences all over Earth didn’t?”

  He dropped her arm in disgust, the visible part of his face flushed. “You’re a fool, Minmei. This club of yours—it was a minor gift from me, haven’t you figured that out yet?”

  The cold metal of his half cowl contrasted with red anger on the rest of his face. “But before long I’ll give you things that will satisfy you, things that only the greatest power and glory can command!”

  He almost told her about the Living Computer, and what use he meant to make of it. Minmei had come to fill his waking thoughts and his dreams. Somehow evading his advances, somehow immune to the charisma and power he had plied so often before, she had only made him want her more. Especially since she had once been Hunter’s!

  I will not be thwarted in this, he vowed. But in some way that he was at a loss to explain, the upper hand had slipped to Minmei. Edwards had roused himself wrathfully, not to be frustrated by this waifish little spellbinder; and in the all-out effort to make her love him, he had somehow made her the embodiment of all his desires and dreams. He saw that now, but it was too late to change things.

  Be that as it might, some iron core of self-preservation and caution kept him from confessing his plots to her. Instead he leaned close, with a look on the exposed half of his face that made her cringe.

  “Is it that ass Wolfe? Is that who you think’s going to come home like a white knight and give you some sort of happily-ever-after? If so, you hear me well, Lynn-Minmei: Wolfe isn’t fit to stand in my shadow!

  “I’m the one who’ll give you what you want and fulfill you at last! I’m the one who’ll stop the aching in your heart!”

  He vaguely knew that he was raving, dimly understood that whatever sorcery it was that Minmei had cast over all the others had been cast over him, too. Only, he was T. R. Edwards, and he
was not about to meet some lovelorn fate.

  He grabbed her arms, and Minmei felt such power in the grip that she knew it was useless to fight. He pressed his mouth to hers; she didn’t resist but she didn’t cooperate. He might as well have been kissing a corpse. He thrust her from him, and she landed on the floor with a small cry.

  “Go on, then, Minmei! Pine for him, while he’s thinking about the wife and child he left back on Earth! Do you really suppose you’re anything but a hardship-tour convenience for Wolfe?”

  Then he was kneeling by her, lips drawn back from his teeth as if he might devour her. She put the back of her hand to her mouth and shrank away from him, but couldn’t take her eyes off him.

  “Perhaps I can’t give you some doglike devotion, or whatever it is that you think love is, Minmei. But power and immortality and passion—those are what drive me, and you and I will share them.”

  She thought dizzily that he was going to grab her again, or—or something else, something she couldn’t put a name to. Instead, as if he were teetering on the brink of an abyss, Edwards pulled himself back, rose, and stared down at her with all emotion closed from his face.

  “And you no longer have any choice in the matter,” he told her. Then he turned on his heel and strode from the club.

  He had barely gotten out the door when his driver came rushing up to him. “Sir, a code ‘Pyramid’ signal from the Royal Hall.”

  Edwards didn’t break stride. “Get me there. Now.”

  In the catacombs under the Royal Hall, past room after room of inert Inorganics stacked like cordwood, Edwards hurried to the chamber where the deactivated Living Computer drifted at the bottom of its tank.

  On a nearby communications screen, Edwards saw an image.

  The Regent, of course; he had seen photos and sketches from the intel summaries, had taken a good look at Tesla, and could extrapolate from there.

  The Regent, for his part, glared down at the half-masked Human and drew conclusions of his own. The Living Computer hadn’t been destroyed, nor had the Inorganics. Yet this couldn’t be the leader of the Human expedition; there was a furtiveness about the way in which the Regent’s communications signal had been received.