He edged in, peered around a corner-and froze.
"Come on; sit down quick, before it gets cold." Minmei blew out a long match as the candles on the improvised dinner table filled the room with a warm glow.
She threw the dead match into the fireplace, looking as awkward as a teenager. "This is just home cooking." It was almost a whisper. "The guys at the club got me the ingredients, but I'm a good chef, T. R.; from way back. Worked in my folks' restaurant."
She swallowed and watched him. Edwards felt like doing something violent; the idea of having feelings this strong for anyone was anathema to him.
"Do you really love me?" Minmei asked him all at once. "I have no way of making you, but please don't lie to me! Can you love me-"
She was cut off by the beep of the special commo apparatus in his study. Without saying a word, he unlocked it by retinal scan, went into it, and locked the door, making the room a secure, soundproofed facility.
He was glad he was sitting down when he keyed the call. It was a patch-through from the loyal Ghost Team techs manning the Invid equipment beneath the Royal Hall. The Regent stared out at him. "You take your time about answering a transmission."
Edwards found his voice. "My apologies. Had I known, I would have-made arrangements."
Not "been waiting"; he had to keep a certain parity here.
The Regent made an annoyed gesture. "There are other arrangements you don't have to make; the Sentinels are destroyed, one and all."
Edwards felt the color rise in his face, and the grip of his hands as he made triumphant fists, but he gave no other sign as a silent victory cry rang through him. "And now it is time you and I met face to face," the Regent continued.
Edwards's eyes narrowed. "Surely, you don't expect me to, to-"
"Come to Optera? No; you wouldn't, would you? But noblesse oblige, and all that; I will come to you, this one time. Do us all a favor, Human, and see-that you make it worth my while."
The Regent broke the connection and Edwards sat there, his head swimming. My rivals are dead. The would-be Overlord of the galaxy wants to cut a deal with me.
Edwards instantly began trying to figure out ways to gull, use, and betray the Regent.
Minmei looked up as Edwards came back into the candlelit dining room. "Good news, I hope?"
"No news at all." He had his hands on his silvery headpiece, straining a bit. "But…where were we? You said please don't lie to you; you said please tell you if I can love you."
He drew the half cowl off his face, letting her see him there in the soft light.
Once, the face had been handsome; but now there were raised white scars in a violent, puckered crisscross, a slash from his hairline to the bridge of his nose and from there a reverse angle to the heel of his jawbone. The eye was scarred shut, with only a little prosthetic fitting showing now. A half-devastated face that gave him a doomed look.
"'Do you really love me?'" he quoted her own words to her. "'I have no way of making you, but please don't lie to me!'"
Where did the act end and truth begin? If she rebuffed him at this moment, Edwards resolved to launch his coup now, taking her as his first hostage and the one he would never let go.
She reached out tentatively, touching the ravaged side of his face. He had never endured that touch from anyone. He returned the touch but otherwise sat like a granite statue. Then she was around the table, in his lap, kissing him.
"Farrago destroyed," Vince Grant said. "But it doesn't look like the Invid are coming after us; something's happening."
The rest of the Sentinels stood around him, repressing their questions; they had already learned that it was bedlam when they all talked at once.
They were gathered in a deactivated GMU; the Praxian requirement that all mecha power down during the meeting in the castle had been an unexpected godsend.
Is this where our luck turns! Gnea wondered.
The Invid fleet above suddenly let forth a myriad of minor sensor "paints," then accelerated for superluminal.
The small observation force of Pincers and Scouts and armored Shock Troopers swept down confidently to take up their places. They quartered the globe that was Praxis. They isolated the important civic-commercial centers, and came in for landings.
The VTs rose up to meet them, having received the word that the Regent was gone. Wolff's Hovertanks fired as Gladiators, or flew on back thrusters as Battloids, dragging the enemy from the air.
Again there was that total environment of warfare, so insane-and yet so emphatic that it seemed to the fighters that it was the only time they were truly alive.
"Skull Ten, you got a bogey; scissor right!"
"Skull Six, Skull Six, scissoring; get 'im off my back, Max!"
And the GMU cannon fired, its first round hitting the Invid command ship. There would be no distress call to the Regent.
The Invid threw themselves into the engagements with utter ferocity. But they were met by young Earth soldiers who were angry about Karbarra and confused and scared about Praxis: in a certain sense, the Invid had made their enemies too scared to give in and too scared to lose.
Neither side could withdraw, and so the fighting went on. One by one, the VTs fell, despite their high kill ratio. The mecha hunted one another across Praxis, the VTs using up ordnance and fuel.
Both Rick and Max were forced to land when their mecha began to lose power; Miriya had been forced to eject earlier, her VT too shot up to stay in the air.
When the Invid were also forced to take to the ground, the Destroids and the Wolff Pack moved in, with other Sentinels on Hovercycles and in flitters, and riding whatever else they could get into the air. The Invid still had the advantage of numbers, but the Hovertanks and REF irregulars were comparatively fresh. In a half-dozen separate, desperate actions, the Invid were surrounded and annihilated, but at terrible cost.
In the aftermath, the principal Sentinels gathered-stunned and bloodied by what they had abruptly endured and realized what had happened to them.
The two or three surviving VTs had landed, spent, no longer capable of lifting off Praxis. Only a handful of Hovertanks and Destroids had survived the no-quarter fighting.
Hundreds were dead, in addition to the thousands who had perished with Farrago. The GMU
was their only resource; they had no way of communicating with Tirol, or any other potential source of rescue.
Bela came by to help a weary Jack to his feet as he sat near the GMU; he had barely escaped his burning Hovertank, and it looked like he was plain old leg infantry again, at least for the foreseeable future.
He was filthy and tired. He had just come in from two sleepless days and nights of recon patrol, trying to make sure there were no Invid left and to find something, anything, that would help the Sentinels get out of their deadend dilemma. And he and his squad had come back empty-handed.
Bela was leading Halidarre, one of the few operating mecha left. "Admiral Hunter wants to see you, old son," she said. He groaned wearily as she pulled him up, and shouldered his Wolverine.
"Where are you headed?" he asked. She and the Robo-horse were laden with gear and weapons, and so was Gnea, who was hurrying up to meet her.
"To scout the planet for Hunter, and for myself. Jack, they can't all be gone." Bela turned and put her hands on his shoulders, Halidarre's rein drooping from her grasp. Her face, with its hypnotic raptor eyes, held him, its lines pulled into fierce but frightened lines. "They can't all be gone!"
He reached up and thumped her shoulder with his fist. "We'll find 'em, sis. You'll see."