The Sentinels' drive flared bright; the starship moved away, its escorts guarding the vessel, as Minmei thought of it, only so far as the end of the proverbial garden path, and then letting it set out into the long night alone.
"Nothing to report to me? Nothing to report? Is that all you can say?"
The Invid Regent stalked through his vast halls in the Invid Home Hive on Optera, and his closest aides, knowing his moods, trailed him dutifully but warily. He was capable of becoming violent without warning-feeding an unfortunate bystander to one of his huge, gem-collared Hellcats, or having them devolved in one of the Genesis Pits or simply lashing out with a physical blow.
And an enraged blow from the Regent was something few might hope to survive. Some twenty feet high, he was the tallest of his race, among whom an average height was some six or eight feet. His advisers, though, like Tesla, stood twice average height.
Unlike the underlings following him, the Regent was draped with an organic cape that grew around the back of his neck and resembled a manta ray, lined from front to back with tuberclelike sensors that resembled eyeballs. He often spread the strange structure like a cobra's mantle in times of fury, and the mantle was stirring restlessly, even now.
"No word from the reinforcements I sent to retake Tirol? No message on the whereabouts of Tesla? No answer from the Regis? Perhaps my servants need motivation."
He stopped to turn to them.
"Your troops have barely had time to reach Karbarra, to pick up forces from the garrison there for the attack on Tirol, much less reach Tirol itself," one of the lackeys managed to get out, trembling.
"A-and perhaps Tesla has paused to gather more varieties of the Fruit of the Flower of Life,"
another one ventured. "He has great hopes that a preparation made from them will be of vast advantage to you, Mighty One!"
"And it may be that your communications have simply not reached the Regis yet," the third pointed out. "She has always responded to Your Magnificence's messages in the past."
Yes. Usually with mockery and defiance. Repelled by his de-evolutionary experiments, just as he was provoked by her insistence on maintaining a form that was Tiresoid-that was so like the females of the race of the hated Zor-the Regis had abandoned him, followed by half their species, like the dividing of some unimaginable insect colony.
And with his resources of troops and vessels and Flower essence so limited in the wake of the vast Invid-Robotech Master war, he could scarcely afford to begin a civil conflict against his own mate and half his race. At least, not yet.
The Regent was in no mood to listen to his underlings' rationalizations, in no mood to be reminded of logistical limits, or of Tesla's semimystical theories about the Fruit of the Flower of Life. He stood now near the center of the Home Hive, a stupendous network of domes and connecting conduits that stretched far and wide across Optera like an incandescent spiderweb. But, with its energy reduced now and its population so depleted, it seemed to mock the power that had once been his.
The feeler-sensors on his snout glowered angrily with the words, "Yes: motivation."
He seized the adviser nearest him, not really caring which one it was, and flung him across the chamber. The underling sprawled and lay quaking. "Kill him," the Regent told the other two.
They didn't hesitate for a moment. Snatching weapons from a pair of armored-trooper sentries, they turned the guns on their former colleague and opened fire. Streams of annihilation disks flew, flaring bright when they struck, enveloping the fallen Invid in a brief inferno. The stench of the charred body wafted through the Hive.
The Regent debated whether he should order the remaining two to shoot each other, or, perhaps more interestingly, themselves. But that would waste more time, since new lackeys would have to be trained from scratch.
His bloodlust had been sated a little. He contented himself with telling them, "Go now and do as I've commanded. And bring me no more news of failure."
Senep, the commander in charge of the Invid mission to send fresh troops to Tirol, was aware of the Regent's state of mind. He was at pains to do his duty well, but quickly.
Reports from Tirol were somewhat sketchy-word that Zentraedi and some apparently unknown Tiresoid race had attacked the planet in concert. Senep's hastily assembled task force, manned by troops borrowed from Karbarra's ample garrison, now moved out for deepspace, still preparing itself for the rather protracted voyage to its objective.
Senep was relieved that his plan to commandeer resources from Karbarra had been approved. To gather units in dribs and drabs from various other worlds, and from the forces patrolling the outer marches of the Invid's shrunken empire, would have cost him time that he could ill afford to waste.
But Senep had been able to make two telling arguments in favor of his idea. One was that Karbarra had more than sufficient Invid strength to perform its task, even with its garrison thus reduced.
The second, and more important, was that the Karbarrans were most unlikely to become intractable or demonstrate any resistance or defiance.
No, the Karbarrans had a very good reason to obey their overlords' every whim without objection.
The Invid commander was still getting his ships into proper formation when a communications tech turned to him, its snout-sensors agleam with emotion as it spoke.
"Commander! Alien starship approaching from deepspace! It just went subluminal and appears to be on course for Karbarra!"
For Karbarra, and Senep's task force. "Identify."
"Impossible, sir. It does not match anything in our data banks."
Senep puzzled for a moment over the long-range sensor image of the Sentinels' ship. "I'm not going to ask questions. Battle stations. All units prepare to attack."
CHAPTER TEN
It is a critical point that each new form of enemy in the Wars was a new problem in the use and application of Earth mecha. What would work against a Battlepod was suicide against Invid Inorganics; the vulnerable points, weaponry, and performance profiles were completely different.
The Human fighters were lucky they had all those curious and experimenting monkeys in their ancestry; the REF in particular was a climate wherein only quick learners survived.
Selig Kahler, The Tirolian Campaign
The voyage from Tirol to Karbarra had been filled with a schedule even more exhausting than the preparations for the Sentinels' departure. Rick, like all the others aboard, had been forced to take what little sleep he could get in catnaps.
They had had to familiarize the non-Human Sentinels with Robotech weapons, of course-as much as was feasible while under way. Some of them, like Burak and Kami, were more than willing to learn, while others-the Karbarran ursinoids and the Praxian amazons in particular-seemed unwilling to trust any small arms but their own. This, though the Karbarrans appeared inclined to try out mecha and Bela and Gnea could barely wait to ride that completely crazy winged horse of Lang's into battle.
Rick and his staff had racked their brains coming up with ways to try to integrate the wildly varied forces in battle and make everybody understand what they were supposed to do. Rick had moments of agonizing doubt that it had been accomplished, wondering if he was heading into one of the worst debacles in military history.
Then there had been the various misunderstandings and frictions to mediate. The Sentinels'
resentment of Cabell and Rem; run-ins between the Humans and non-Humans as cultural difference led to clashes (well, the Hovertanker did have that fractured jaw coming to him for calling the Praxian woman a "brawny wench," even if it was meant jokingly); the constant insistence of Burak and the other Perytonians that their planet be given higher priority in the campaign-it was all beginning to give Rick migraines.