"Of course you don't! The Sentinels will accept you as allies, and enlist others who are willing to fight, but I'll tell you something, Admiral Hunter: none among us will ever feel quite the same bond with anyone who wasn't caged with us-trust them to fight, as we intend to, until we win or until we die!"
Rick thought for a moment about Earth history. Of monstrous freight trains and mass gas chambers. He picked the towel up off the deck, folding it carefully. "Fair enough." He looked to Veidt.
"But we're going to help you. And if you want to know why, just look through our ship's history files."
Veidt nodded as if he already had, "We have all agreed to recrew this ship, if possible, and set course for Karbarra. Without delay."
"What? Wait a second!" There would have to be meetings, resolutions from the council, personnel allocations, resource diversion, interdivision liaison, staff meetings, marital counseling, maintenance checks…
"What d'ya mean, 'without delay'?"
"I mean that within twenty-four of your hours, we intend to depart," Veidt answered in a reasonable tone. "Would ten days be better? Or ten months? You may multiply the beings who will die under Invid tyranny by the minute!"
"All right; you've made your point," Rick grunted in a sound like something Lron would make.
"I guess it's doable." He was staring over at the people who seemed to be prepared to climb into the cage with Tesla to get good shots of him.
So that's the enemy. Or at least one form of him. "He was your, your zookeeper, right?" Rick asked Veidt.
"I think the words coincide," Veidt allowed. "Though I suppose Tesla had much more unhappy plans for us. Why?"
"How'd you beat him?" Rick pressed. "How'd you take the ship?"
"Ah. Well. Sarna and I were chained by the neck-no arms, of course-and fed by Invid functionaries, from beyond a line they'd drawn on the deck. But after some time we came up with a way to eradicate their line, and draw one of our own, a line much closer to us. The rest was even simpler than fooling the Invid."
So all this apparent limblessness didn't mean that Veidt and his kind couldn't knock some Invid out of commission, although they had perhaps used a method that had nothing to do with savate or tae kwon do. Rick filed the information in his memory, and was about to get on to matters at hand, when he heard a mighty roaring.
The Invid Master Scientist, Tesla, wasn't happy with Sentinel protocol. Praxian amazons harried him with electrified prods. Karbarran deck apes jostled him in rude fashion-preparing him for interrogation. Not a single Sentinel showed any excessive brutality, but not a single one showed the least kindness, either.
In that moment, long before his conversations with the Plenipotentiary Council or his consultations with his wife, Rick Hunter understood that the Sentinels would do just what they had pledged one another: win or die.
And he knew that he would go with them, even though it might mean the death of his marriage.
But the courage he admired in the Sentinels wasn't very much different from the courage he adored in Lisa.
The Sentinels were adamant about their departure schedule, despite the council's demand for time to mull it over. Then Miriya Sterling came up with a little salesmanship. She considered the problem with a soldier's insight, and whispered a suggestion into the ear of her husband, Max Sterling, Skull Leader. Max passed it on to Lisa.
Lisa Hayes Hunter still didn't know exactly what to feel about the Sentinels' appearance. Aside from the new crisis it had thrust upon the SDF-3, there was the striking change in Rick. But when she found herself hoping the council would vote not to extend aid to the revolutionaries, Lisa reminded herself of the lives being crushed and extinguished by the Invid.
So, she took Miriya's advice, and gave the Sentinel leaders a quick tour of some of the superdimensional fortress's armories in an aircar. The Karbarrans, in particular, showed their delight at the ranked mecha, howling and pounding the aircar's railing until they threatened to damage it. The pilot guided them slowly past Hovertanks and Logans, and second-generation Destroids along with armored ground vehicles and self-propelled artillery.
The women of Praxis, in particular, were loud in their praise of such wonderful war machines.
Lisa felt fascinated and a little threatened by their bigger-than-life, bloodthirsty beauty. She looked to her husband from time to time; he seemed lost in thought. But she could tell, could almost hear, what he was thinking, and it made her feel empty inside.
"Amazing," Lang kept mumbling, skimming the preliminary reports from the sci/tech people and the intel teams that had gone aboard the Sentinels' flagship.
Justine Huxley, next to him at the council table, made an exasperated sound and leaned over to whisper into his ear. "Emil, please! This is crucial!"
He wanted to object, to tell her how much more fascinating his data was than more of the endless wrangling and political maneuvering the Sentinels' appearance had generated. But she was right; even the council sensed the urgency of the situation, and was moving with unaccustomed speed.
Still, there was a wealth of information the Sentinels had given the expedition teams! Take the drive of that incredible Karbarran vessel, for example. Hunter hadn't been hallucinating: it was powered by furnaces that consumed a substance analogous to peat or lignite. But the stuff seemed to be some sort of distant forerunner of the Flower of Life itself-an Ur-Flower! And then there was the half myth, half religion that surrounded the ancient being or entity known as Haydon…
He realized someone was addressing him. "Eh? What was that, Mr. Chairman?"
Senator Longchamps controlled his temper and began again. "I asked if, in your opinion, it would be feasible for the SDF-3 to accompany the Sentinels and lend her fire-power in support of their mission."
Lang threw down his papers. "The entire idea is asinine, my dear sir! The damage we suffered is far from repaired, and it will be two years, at the very least, before our primary drive is repaired!"
"But more to the point, the SDF-3 must remain here to insure that the mining of monopole ore goes on uninterrupted. Without Fantoma's ore, we have no way home. So you see, what the Sentinels proposed is the wisest course-the only sensible one open to us, in my opinion. We must detach what military forces we can to aid them in their cause and at the same time divert the Invid."
"I concur," Exedore said, and Justine Huxley nodded.
"You tell 'em," T. R. Edwards smirked from one side, having finished his testimony a short time before.
Edwards's sudden willingness to see SDF forces seconded to the Sentinels-his almost eager advocacy of the plan-perplexed and worried Exedore and some of the others. It wasn't like the man to feel compassion for non-Humans; in fact, his hatred of Zentraedi was well known, and his hostility toward Rem and Cabell was already evident.
But, Edwards saw the opportunity presented by the Sentinels' arrival as something of a miracle. The incredible secret to which he had been exposed during the first assault on Tirol had expanded his horizons until they spanned the galaxy.
With a little shrewd maneuvering, he could get rid of most or all of those who stood in his path to power. They would be out of the way for as long as the Sentinels' war lasted, and perhaps forever, given the vagaries of combat.
"We estimate that we can assign mixed forces totaling some thousand or so to the Sentinels'
cause, along with mecha, equipment, and so forth, and still leave ourselves sufficient resources to defend the SDF-3, Tirol, and the mining operations on Fantoma," a G-3 operations staff officer was telling, the council. "The Sentinels will need experienced senior commanders to help them plan strategy and arm, organize, and train the troops they mean to recruit as they go along."