Optera! Birthplace of the Flowers of Life and their agents of retribution, the Invid . . . nexus for an unfolding of events that had left the galaxy reshaped and redefined . . . and now the focal point of the Sentinels' long campaign to liberate the Quadrant from the Regent's tyranny.
Edwards is on his way to Optera, in flight from Tirol with his prisoner Lynn-Minmei and a handful of Invid Inorganics under his control. So too are Breetai's Zentraedi -- closing on the very world the Imperative bade them defoliate generations ago -- and the renegade forces of Tesla, mutated beyond recognition by the fruits of the Flower.
The Sentinels themselves are not far behind. However, they have Peryton to deal with first -- a godforsaken planet cursed by fate and time itself. But what awaits Rick, Lisa, and the Human Sentinels there is a mere primer for what is to come: the realization that they have journeyed across the galaxy . . . to wage war against each other!
Release date:
April 30, 2014
Publisher:
Del Rey
Print pages:
208
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They were the New Paladins, riding forth to answer the trumpet call to a nightmare war.
They were mortals caught up in events that transcended anything they had ever expected.
Many of them were career military people who had learned that wars were often won by those who made the fewest screwups.
But they also knew that everybody screws up sometime. Le Roy la Paz, The Sentinels
“Everybody stay sharp! Looks like we’re gonna have to go to guns!”
Jack Baker trimmed the mated Veritechs he was flying—the sleek Alpha fighter was now joined like a vaned nose cone to the bigger, burlier Beta ship. A quick glance over his weapons status displays revealed that the other two Alpha-Betas of his raiding party were still in tight formation behind him.
“Jack, no!” yelled Janice Em. She was in the second ship along with Burak, Lron, and Tesla. “You heard what Veidt and Sarna said: this world’s defenses will respond to any hostile action!”
Actually, Veidt had said the legendary protective systems of the planet responded to the mere intent of intrusion or provocative act. And that certainly seemed to be the case today, even though the fighters had gone in with weapons and shields down.
“I got a news flash for you: we’ve already got Haydon IV PO’d at us, kiddo,” Jack snorted. “Or d’you think this planet’s surface usually twitches and then starts spitting sparklers at people? Get ready; like it or not, it looks as if we’re in for some turns ’n’ burns.”
One part of him registered the fact that the terrain of Haydon IV wasn’t actually twitching; it was changing shape, like something from one of those old-time clay-animation flicks. And the things shooting up at the incoming Veritechs were more like swirling vortices or sheets of flame than sparklers.
Whatever they were, they were traveling at such high velocity that Jack saw the VTs had no chance of running for it.
“Activate shields and weapons.” Jack tried to sound calm. “And stay close to me.” It was too late to go back, so there was nothing to do but drive on.
“Only he wished there were experienced combat fliers in the other two combined VTs. Janice had been through training, and so had Learna, but neither of them had any dogfighting experience to speak of. He would have preferred to have Max and Miriya Sterling flying at his wing-tips.
But Miriya had been stricken, like Rick Hunter and his wife Lisa, by the strange microorganisms of Garuda. And so had another Sentinel, one whose possible death filled Jack with feelings and impulses that bewildered and shocked him …
He tried to put that out of his mind; what was happening to the famous Baker cool and concentration? Damn!
From the cockpit’s rear seat, where she was strapped into the copilot’s station, Bela reached forward to clap him on the shoulder. “That’s the lad! Kick their flaming arses! I’ll loan you the boot!”
The vortices of fire came darting and circling, changing shape and roiling—like silken scarves on the wind. All Jack’s sensors were in alarm mode, but none of them could tell him what he was facing.
Fire with fire, he told himself fatalistically, and put a burst of pumped laser into the first one to come into range.
Somehow Tesla got on the tac net. “No, you fool! You’re signing our death warrants!”
“Don’t bother me; I’m workin’,” Jack growled.
The cannonfire seemed to have no effect; the vortice changed course a bit and came straight for him. He shot it again. The other VTs chose targets of opportunity and opened up, too.
The vortices flared angrily, and some were jarred, but they kept coming. More came from what seemed to be an opening in the countryside below, like flecks of incandescent paint falling upward.
Jack was still firing when the first vortex hit him. It flared angrily against his shields, sending the indicators toward the danger zones, and it seemed he could feel the infernal heat right through the fuselage. More swarmed after.
The other VTs were struck, too. The vortices spread across them, coating them in a blinding radiance.
“Wake up! Come, come; I have no time for this nonsense! Wake him!”
Rem heard the thick, moist rumbling voice, loud enough to echo and shake the walls. He associated it with the sensation he felt now: bonds still holding his raw, bleeding wrists and ankles, and the cottony blur the Invid psy-scanners had left in his brain.
At the Regent’s command, Invid officers applied brief pain to speed up the effects of the reviving injections they had given him. Rem squirmed and moaned, shaking off part of the fog, and opened his eyes.
Rem saw the throne room that the Regent had decreed for himself high in a Haydon IV tower. It was a minor mercy to see the light of Briz’dziki, the local sun, rather than the cold insides of the Invid’s nearby hive.
Rem tried to recall what he was doing there, and it came back in a confused, horrifying rush. Capture by the Invid on Garuda; exposure to Garudan atmosphere—why wasn’t he dead, or mad?
Or, perhaps he was—perhaps he was both.
No, he wasn’t dead; the pain of his shackles was a branding-hot clarity too sharp for that. But mad …
As he struggled feebly, he heard a low, mosquitolike humming that quickly built until it shock-waved from one side of his skull to the other. The shackles seemed to grow teeth and gnaw at his wrists, promising to devour their way up his arms and legs, ripping and savaging.
Rem screamed. The Invid stench coagulated with evil glee in his chest—he was sure he would suffocate.
Not mad, then—but even more terribly, a victim of hin, the Garudan altered-reality or transcendent state.
Kami and Learna and their people thrived that way—in hin—as a matter of symbiotic course, interacting with their environment on a microorganic, even subatomic, scale. Stranded from the synergistic biota of their planet, they would not even be sentient beings.
But to outside life-forms, exposure to the atmosphere of Garuda and to hin was a sentence of death by insanity.
Rem fought to hold onto some last shred of reality. The seemingly endless memories of the Optera of long ago, and the paradise it had been—but had he only dreamed them? Images of the Regent’s estranged mate, the Regess, and her passion for Zor, whose biogenetic material had been made manifest in Rem’s cloning—were they fever-dreams of the hin? But they had seemed so real, not hallucinatory; more ordered and in focus than any dream or nightmare.
The Invid officers hoisted Rem to his feet with a clanking of his chains. To Rem’s addled and tormented senses, the cold tiles felt like white-green frost that burned the soles of his feet and froze them at the same time.
The Regent loomed before him, twenty feet high, massive and terrible, his mantle spread like a cobra’s hood as he gazed down through liquid black eyes as big as manhole covers. Rem felt the hin seize him again, making the breath in his lungs congeal and refuse to move.
Rem heard his own whimpering, felt his self-control about to slip from his grasp. He had the abrupt impression that there were things in the shadows waiting to pounce upon him and feast on his marrow, then take his mind and steal his soul. And though a remote part of his intellect could recognize it as the mind-wrenching effect of hin, he couldn’t find the strength of will to fight it.
“Stand him up straight,” the Regent said, when Rem would have pulled himself into a weeping fetal ball. “Hold his head up.”
“When Rem was standing up and staring, as wild-eyed as an animal with its leg in a trap, the Regent went on. “You’re a very difficult fellow, Tiresian. Or should I say, ‘Clone’? Or better yet, ‘Zor-clone’?”
He held up four-fingered fists on wrists several times thicker than Rem’s waist. “Whatever you really are, here’s something that might interest you. Your Sentinel friends are coming.”
Rem couldn’t hide a wretched whimper of disbelief and despair mixed with crazed hope. The Regent caught it. “That’s right: they are coming directly into my hands. To be imprisoned like you, to be put to the Inquisition like you, and to go through all the pain and mind-probing you’ve gone through.”
Rem was nearly in tears, but the Regent was leaning forward in the colossal throne, drowning him out. “But it needn’t happen that way! You can save them, Zor-clone, and save yourself as well! The Haydon IV healers can cure them and cure you, too, this very hour; you can leave with them—if you’ll simply say a few paltry words and give me what I want.”
Rem was broken. Courage and conviction and strength and faith—and even love—are overrated when it comes to defense against torture. Yet the Regent failed to incorporate one thing into his equations—the one factor that no agony could overcome: ignorance.
“Tell me where the last Protoculture matrix is,” the Regent hissed. “Tell me where the original Zor sent it—hid it! You have many of his memories—how, I’m not sure. But that one must be there, it must!”
But it wasn’t. If it had been, Rem would have yielded it up in a moment. That escape was closed to him, though.
Rem laid his head to his chest and sobbed. Deep in the hin, he felt the sunlight jeering at him, his fear-sweat turning to acid against his skin, panic closing off his windpipe.
He heard the creak as the Regent rose from his chair. “Above all things, I despise stubbornness. That, I punish.”
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